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.

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...