My "Mary's Garden" crazy quilt is on tour

In the spring of 2006 my art quilt "Mary's Garden" was juried into the ARTQUILTimages show sponsored by Profession Art Quilt Alliance-South. This show has been traveling ever since - after visiting 5venues in 5 states the final show is at CK Media Gallery in Golden, Colorado. My crazy quilt "Mary's Garden" is featured on their website.
This quilt is dedicated to Mary Dozeman, my maternal grandmother, and features several photographs of her, my mother June De Vries, and one photo with the three of us - taken in Montana in 1960. I transfered the photos to fabric and then used the fabric in the crazy quilt motif.

Crazy quilt on tour

Early in January 2006 I was suddenly struck with a desire to create a crazy quilt. I had already done scrapbooking and stamping so taking those ideas and applying them to cloth seemed natural to me. I discovered an art quilt group that was located nearby and their deadline for an upcoming exhibit was exactly the motivation I needed to finish the creation. This is a closeup of a portion of the quilt. This quilt is named "Mary's Garden" after my grandmother, and it is on tour with this show PAQA-South ARTQUILTSimages.

I love to shop

Well I'm hot on the trail of some wonderful surprises for my Color Swap pal and my Knitted Purse Swap pal. I am a serious shopper - really. After I had spent an hour at T.J. Maxx once, digging through the piles of clothes looking for the magic red clearance tags, I sighed loudly and said to the well-dressed woman next to me "Why do I do this? It's hard work!". With a straight face, she wisely answered "It's a sport.". So true.

I have to admit I'm finding it harder than I expected to decide on my swap gifts. I want to give something that's "just right". But I am enjoying the process and am glad that we have deadlines to make our decisions.

One of my husband's businesses is a packaging/shipping store so he'll be in charge of shipping my gifts when they are ready. I love delegating.

And today I made a big yarn purchase for me. I've decided to learn how to knit socks. I've been seeing hand-dyed sock yarn around that is just pulling me in. I've ordered Monarch sock yarn from Angora Valley after seeing some bloggers post about their purchases. Of course I had to order 3 skeins so now I'm committed!

On the top left is one of my art quilts made with my hand-dyed cotton. This one is titled "Color Study 2" and it's about 18inches wide and 5 feet high. It was in a show at a local art center for the month of October 2006.

Happy shopping!

The Ascension

This is one of my art quilts; it measures about 50x80 inches. During January and Feb of 2006 I started collecting batiks in the red/orange/yellow color range. Since I was making the quilt during the time between Easter and Christ's Ascension, I was inspired by my devotions to symbolize the ascension with the colors fading at the top. The red lines depict the blood shed and the black lines symbolize how the ascension conquers death for all who believe. The quilting does not show in the picture but this was my first attempt to do machine quilting with my old Kenmore. The thread is a luscious variegated red/orange.

Art quilting is simply an original (no pattern) quilt of any size, usually to be used as a wall hanging.