Little Birdies brought to you by Susan Pickrell

I have talked about the talented Susan Pickrell before.  Everytime we have a "Twisted Stitchers" meeting (the subgroup of art quilters with the Batty Binders)  She has a bunch of little fiber things to share.  This time, she was doing birds.  Lots of birds.

These little owlets were done with felting.  But the bigger owl and the little Chickie with two Baguettes below were done from the book below the Chickie, from Little Birds,  by C & T Publisher's Design Collective.  You can get it on Amazon, or your favorite bookstore, or you can get it as an e-book  (or as the real deal) directly from C & T  here.  I have never seen it, but I'm intrigued now that I have seen what Susan has done.

And to show you how modest she is (as well as prolific)  I commented on her gorgeous journal, knowing full well she had done the cover herself.  "Oh, it's just a little ribbon" said Susan.  Right.  Ribbon, machine embroidered peacock feathers on soluble stabilizer, combined with ribbon and other decorations she put together herself...after working...going to a family funeral out-of-state...she's just amazing!

The Last Tree in the Batty Binder Forest Linette Vagades

Linette Vagedes is a special needs teacher in an elementary school and loves to mess around with art quilting...She is often frustrated, however, at trying to get what is in her mind's eye, onto the fabric, something which stymies most of us from time to time.

Here's her little "blank" tree.

I'm a little amused by this...it seems to have a split personality...a tree in the late autumn just as the frost and snow begins to come.  You might think that the addition on the side of the piecing is a bit odd...but the exercise that the person who added it was trying to work with was creating piecing.

I really can't remember who did what here.....I do know, however, that Susan Pickrell was responsible for the fairy and for the spiderweb in the tree....

I love the texture and depth that the additions to the base gave the tree. I think that the trunk may have had some paint added as well.

I'm sorry my picture didn't show it better, but there are whispers of silver thread through it very nicely stitched close together to suggest the wind.  I think Becky Goodwin was responsible for that, but it may have been Jo Heffner.

Here's the whole crew with their pieces....I'm not sure if the group really accomplished what they wanted to do with this project, but I can say they had a whole heck of a lot of fun doing it.

More Trees in the Batty Binder's Arboretum from the Chief Forester

 This is Susan Pickrell.  She is an amazing person.  I'm sure that your local quilt group has someone like Susan....but then on the other hand, maybe not.  Susan loves to learn new things.  If it has anything to do with fiber, she does it.  She knits, crochets, quilts, does wonders with her embroidery machine, and a couple of years ago I let her know about a really inexpensive felting machine, and gosh if she didn't get that too.  But that's not all.  Although Susan's kids are all grown, she still works, and is extremely active in her church and belongs to a dulcimer group and plays quite a bit.  On top of that...well, she just always manages to do really nice things for people AND finish projects...

Here's the tree blank that Susan passed around....She made a ton of them trying to figure out what she was going to do, and she used some of them to do mock ups to practice on before she used the technique on the exchange quilt. I thought this blank was interesting because of her choice of fabrics.  The stripes really gave some cool texture to the tree.

 Here's what she got back.  Gwen added the brown square at the bottom....it's a tea bag.. Gwen works as waitstaff at a restaurant and gets us their commercial sized tea bags to play with.  Linette wrote "peace" over the top because when she thinks of peace, she thinks of Susan...not just because Susan is a Quaker, but because although she is very energetic, Susan exudes peace.  Linnette also added the red deer which is actually a hang tag made of thick cardboard from one of her husband's shirts.  Truth be told...I don't remember who added the other things.

Susan was really surprised when she got hers back.







But as in the Ginsu knife commercials, "Wait! There's More!!!!"

 This is a larger piece that Susan was playing with.  The leaves ont he tree were felted ones she made from when she was working them out.  She said that making them was a little addictive.  She also included a fairy as practice for the fairy she used on someone else's quilt (I think Linette's).











This tree is one which because of the background with the lightning bolts (a halloween fabric) and the close value of the tree, it looks more like a ghost tree.  She practiced some fancy silver thread stitching and put on a silver spiderweb cut from another halloween specialty fabric she got on clearance.

 This quilt use used gauze (cheese cloth) for the tree limbs.  The back ground is a Cheetah Girl's print (also from clearance which had some neat sayings on it).

This piece she practiced her shadow work, and included a deep shadow on the side of the tree.

Here you can see it over all.  She's not really done with these, they were just play pieces.  She did these as well as worked on everyone else's quilts, decorated their boxes, made little booklets and cards to put in as well as making cases for some of the cameras which were included in the boxes.  Oh, and decorated the journals and tucked in extra pieces, bits and bobs she found that she thought others could use in their work.

Art Quilt Forest: Ruth Treon's Tree

 I have been madly trying to get three quilts done to submit to the Studio Art Quilt Associations Ohio regional show...and quite frankly, have been too tuckered out to write! As I just got two of them pinned to the carpet and blocked, I'm going to take a little break and post this. :)

One of the things I think which was difficult for our little art Quilt group is to figure out how much or how little to make our blanks.  
Compare Ruth Treon's branches which flow off the space, with Gwen's (Here on Feb. 1)which were well.....truncated!

Ruth also packed her quilt bits in a shoe box to pass around.

 Remember, the originator didn't get to see these until the reveal.  Here you see Ruth's surprise as Loraine looks on.

As I mentioned, Susan Pickrell decided that the boxes needed embellishment....and she really had a heyday with Ruth's box.  The cover was covered with some trapunto quilting.  Inside, Susan made a yarn cover (I don't know if she knitted it or crocheted it) for her camera and stuck in some other interesting things in case someone wanted to use them on Ruth's work.

 Here's Ruth's finished piece.  Susan did the first thing which was to work with a word (the assignment from the Art Quilt Workbook which was applied on her turn).  Her word was "shadow."  Susan wrote "shadow" repeatedly on her sewing machine over net stabilized with water soluble stabilizer. This became the tree's shadow.

I think, but I'm not sure, that Linnette Vagedes added the pieced quilt...Becky Goodwin added the angelina frost which I think turned out great, Gwen Brown the painted area in the sky, and Jo Heffner made the rabbit and the rabbit footprints.

Here you can see more closely the really cool bird that Loraine Smith added...it has a real feather tail, and it is really tiny.  The over all size of this piece is about 14" tall.....so the bird is about 1/2" long.

A Tree in the Batty Binder's Art Quilt Forest: Jo Heffner

 As I mentioned in my post from earlier this week, the art quilt subgroup (Twisted Stitchers) of the Batty Binder's Quilt Guild in Troy did an exchange this last year.  The process is commonly called a "Round Robin".  Each person in the group made a basic quilt (usually in a traditional guild it is a block), then, they pass off the quilt to the next person who adds something.  After passing through the entire group, the piece returns to the originator to finish it.

In the case of the Batty Binders, each "turn" of the round robin was to be drawn from the theme of the chapters in Jane D'Avila and Elin Waterston's Art Quilt Workbook.

Here, you see Jo Heffner's "blank."  All of the quilts were to have a tree motif.  Jo was quite clever and shows her traditional roots by piecing the sky.  You can see what a great job she did at shifting the colors and texture to give it more interest.  Oh...and all of the quilts were supposed to be around 11" x 14".

Here's what Jo got back.  The first person to add something was Becky Goodwin who added the paper pieced flying geese swath which is just gorgeous in real life.  She used iridescent fabric and I think (if I remember correctly) batik for the points. Susan Pickrell added felted leaves embellished with beads....she got carried away with the felting and I love the whimsical feel the addition gives the piece.  Gwen added the "creative piecing" element with the kite....and I can't remember if she also added the girl or if Ruth Treon added that.  I think...but I can't swear to it, that Linnette Vagedes added the squirrel and the dragonfly....

I'm going to have to rely on the group to chime in and straighten me out....The owner's are lucky as they sent a blank notebook around with their work and as each person worked on it, they added their thoughts and reasons for adding what they did....in addition to exactly what they added and the date.  They also took a picture of what it looked like when they were done with it so that the originator could see it "grow."

I didn't participate, largely because I had only had two courses of chemo therapy under my belt at the time and I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to complete it even in the 2 months that everyone had to work on them...I think I made a wise choice because my hands just don't work like they once did and I find it interesting to say the least as I re-learn how to quilt with my hands just not going like they once did.  Practice will make perfect.  In addition, in about June of this year, I began to have vision problems which progressed...

"I may be crazy, but I might just be the Lunatic You're looking for....."

Susasn Pickerell and Maria Elkins

Well...sort of...I sometimes think I am ADD when it comes to quilting and fun things....I'm madly trying to finish the Dayton Landmarks slice so I can hand it in on Saturday as well as catch up with the on-line class with Pamela Allen ("Think Like and Artist.").

I suppose thinking like an artist might include attention deficit disorder, but I don't think REAL artists suffer from this...I imagine they are more disciplined.

You see, I've been wondering about some of the new stuff out there..and when Maria Elkins contacted me about working with her on a new series she's hoping to do for Quilting Arts, I jumped at it.

Maria plans on a series of working with new materials...in this case, DeColorant.  I purchased some in Cincinnati  but haven't had a chance to use it yet and I thought it might work well for what I had in mind for a fabric for the next part of Pamela's lessons...of which I am woefully behind...and while I was at it, I thought I'd make it work with the Fast Friday Challenge too....and I'm late on that one as well. So...today, Debra Bentley, Susan Pickrell, Maria Elkins and I did all sorts of stuff with DeColorant...testing, messing up, seeing what happens if you do this or that....and we'll do some more on Friday.....so ....now I have to get back to the salt mines...but I thought you'd like to know what I'm up to ...before I end up strapped to an....oh, wait...that's in Billy Joel's song...not my life. :)

P.S. Apologies to Deb...she was working back at the ironing board when I took these....

Susan Pickerel and Maria Elkins (background) working hard.

The Forest of Trees: Susan Pickerell's Round Robin

This is Susan Pickrell and her tree which she is sending on for her round robin. It's a great tree and Susan believes in practice....lots of practice.

She tried several different things before finally settling on this one....and I have to admit, some of the pictures aren't terribly flattering of Susan as she was flipping through them all so quickly, it was hard to get....and I didn't notice Gwen's straw sticking up into the photos.







This one is her "Jungle tree" . She slipped in a lion and a monkey from some novelty prints into it....and there's a Cheetah Girl from the print she chose as a background.














She used some t-shirt transfers cut out and arranged so that the words made the "leaves" of the tree in this one....which will be really cool with more embellishment. Like me, Susan haunts the clearance section of various craft stores and comes up with some really interesting ways of using them.

This next one is her strip tree....notice how she's been consistent with her light source and made sure that the shadow only fell on one side of the tree...something I really have to be mindful of. It's easy to accidentally place light coming from several different angles....



This next one she used some cheese cloth....and then painted it. She felt that the paint wasn't too successful. The writing in the fabric is from a "Cheetah Girl" fabric which was in clearance...I liked the fabric, and I liked the sentiment...but I wasn't thrilled with the signature of "The Cheetah Girls." Somehow when Susan's using it, you don't even notice.











This next one is one which Susan calls her "fiber tree." Susan needle felted a variety of specialty yarns into the background. She bought a Singer Embellisher and has been very happy with it.





























This ones kind of fun because she used some fabrics from her stash. I can't wait to see what she ends up doing with it.especially since the blue of the tree is so similar to the lightning print she used for the sky.


This next one is what she calls her "Asian Pine." She was doing some machine embroidery and designed this one.








This last one is another one which I think is kind of fun. The fencing is made from an embroidered ribbon.

Susan is relatively new to art quilting...I think this exploration the Batty Binders has been doing has really pushed her to try some of the things she had in her head already. She does a lot of the practice pieces from Quilting Arts and is very faithful in working at this. She's also got a great imagination. I can't wait to see what she's going to do next!

Visual Texture and Art + Quilt

Tonight was my Batty Binder's Art Quilt study group (Twisted Stitchers). I've been leading a small group of women through the Art Quilt Workbook by Jane D'Avila and Elin Waterston. Since I knew several people were going to be gone tonight (in actuality only two were) and I wasn't sure where in the process everyone was, I decided we would share what we have and do an exercise on visual texture from Lyric Kinard's book, Art + Quilt.

We started out with our "share". Susan Pickerell, at right, brought along a bag of trims and goodies she picked up at a church rummage sale. In the bag were all sorts of wonderful things, including this chiffon headscarf that Linette Vagedes had to share with us, modeling it in her best 1960s and 70s style. No, she doesn't look this goofy in her normal life. Susan was kind and shared some of her bounty with us. We did look at four small quilts, but I was so involved in moving the group along..I forgot to shoot them.

My Miami Valley Art Quilt Network has just started working through Art +Quilt. As usual, I'm behind...and I'm quaking in my boots as this book has many in depth exercises. If I can complete it, then I think I will have learned a lot and become a better quilter.

The point of the book is design methods. In this particular exercise, you are to photocopy in black and white five different fabrics which have different visual texture, then combine them in various ways to see what happens. In the MVAQN group, we realized that the stark white backgrounds didn't seem to make as successful designs, so I had this group put it on a textured background, although we discussed the differences. This exercise is great, but time consuming. One of our MVAQN members spent about 20 hours working on hers.

Here, you see our rebel, Gwen Brown's composition. It's pretty neat...although Gwen decided to make her pieces have actual texture in addition to the print. She made her paper "quilt" three dimensional. I can't complain too much because my effort was really bad and I couldn't quite seem to get anything going that I liked.


Here's Ruth Treon's. Pretty cool. Next is Susan Pickrell's.





















This last one is supposed to be a vertical orientation, and it also cheats a little as it too is three dimensional as well as having a strip of chenille rickrack added.

Lyric's book, if it continues in this vein, is going to require a lot of effort to complete the exercises. I hope I can get some time to work on them. In the meantime, enjoy these paper "quilts."