Cindy Grisdela ~ art quilter

I’m pleased to announce I’ll be the guest speaker at the Textile Museum’s Rug and Textile Appreciation morning this Saturday, July 24, 2010 from 10:30 AM-12 PM. I’ll bring lots of quilts to show and talk about how I use color and fabric to create eye-catching designs, like Playing With Crayons at right. I always enjoy giving these talks and sharing my work with a new audience. The museum is located at 2320 S. St., NW in Washington, DC and the program is free and open to the public. For more information about the museum, click on the link above. If you’re in the area on Saturday morning, please stop by, I’d love to see you!

Playing With Crayons is one of my favorite pieces, because it is a great example of my fascination with colors and the way they interact. I had the idea to create diagonal bands of color across the surface of the quilt, so I pulled out as many different fabrics as I could in each of the color families and started making wonky log cabin blocks and putting them up on the design wall. It was so much fun to see the design emerge and  the fabrics “talk” to one another. There must be over 100 different fabrics in this piece and it’s quilted in an allover spiral design, which you can see better if you double-click on the image. Crayons is a bright, cheerful design that makes me smile every time I see it. I hope to be able to revisit this design soon in a more muted color scheme to see how it translates in earth tones. What do you think?

Cosmos (detail)

I’ve been spending a good bit of time the last several days thinking about the new year and what I want to accomplish in 2010. I’m not big on resolutions, but I’ve been intrigued by blogs by Lisa Call and others that talk about choosing a word for the year (www.blog.lisacall.com). So I’ve decided that my word for 2010 will be Expand. I want to expand my work beyond my comfort zone, I want to grow as an artist and try new things. And I want to have fun with the possibilities.

I started on this path to some extent in 2009, when I was accepted as a member of the Potomac Fiber Arts Gallery www.potomaccraftsmengallery.com and gained a new venue to show my work.

At right is a detail of “Cosmos,” one of my newer pieces and the latest in my Playing with Colors series. It’s an example of my new quilting strategy to make my quilting designs more complex and interesting. If you look closely you can see two or three different design motifs in the pattern of the thread. I deliberately chose to do this on a fairly busy piece so if I wasn’t happy with the result the quilt wouldn’t be ruined. But I am happy with it and I wish it showed up better! I tried this idea on my next piece, “Color My World,” which I just had photographed today and can’t wait to show you because you can see the detail much more clearly. It’s more challenging to quilt this way, because I add the quilting designs myself on my home sewing machine–there’s no computer involved! But in the end it’s more interesting to work on and to look at. I want to Expand and do more of this kind of work in 2010.

Happy New Year!

Cosmos

I finished “Cosmos” last Saturday right before the Artfest and I will have it on display at the Great Falls Studios Studio Tour next weekend, Oct. 17-18. It really does hang straight–this is not a professional photograph, but I wanted to share!

This piece grew out of my “Playing with Colors” series. I used the same improvisationally pieced circles as I did in the earlier quilt, but I wanted to limit the color palette to explore the complementary colors of blue and orange. The design took me a while to create because I had several different ideas to try and I had to live with each one on the design wall for a period of time before I decided which one I liked best. This design made me think of the images from telescopes in space of exploding stars and the universe–hence the name.

I’m really excited about the quilting on this piece, which unfortunately doesn’t show up well in this photo. I’ll post about it in more detail once I get the professional photo done. Usually on a piece like this I just choose one overall design motif and quilt it that way. I’m moving in a new direction with my most recent work, however, and putting different design motifs in the same quilt. This quilt has three different motifs worked into the design. It’s more complicated to do because it requires more planning of the quilting, but it’s more interesting to quilt and I hope to look at.

One more week until the Studio Tour! Visit the Great Falls Studios website for more information at www.greatfallsstudios.com

On the website you can register to win one of 40 $50 “Art Bucks” coupons good toward the purchase of art at any studio tour venue during the tour, plus you can downloan a map and artist directory to plan your visit. Or pick up a free color catalog at any artist venue, including the Great Falls Library at 9830 Georgetown Pike.

I hope you’ll have time to stop by!

"Cosmos" 48 x 29

I’ve been working on “Cosmos” most of the summer and it’s finally pieced! This is the newest piece  in my “Playing with Colors” series and I expect to have it finished in time for the MPArtfest on Oct. 4. You can see the others in the series “Playing with Crayons” and “Playing with Colors” on my website in the Large Art Quilts gallery.

The other two quilts in the series use the full color spectrum, but in this one I wanted to focus on just two main complementary colors, blue and orange. I used the same improvisational quarter circle blocks I’ve used in several recent pieces and pushed the blues on both sides of the color wheel from blue-green through blue-purple to add interest to the design. There are also 3 or 4 different oranges.

Initially I had the orange sections floating randomly across the surface of the piece, but after it sat on the design wall for several weeks, I decided that it would be more interesting to have them form more of a pattern. The result reminded me of pictures from space–hence the name.

I’m really excited to announce that “Playing with Colors” has been juried into the 25th Anniversary American Quilter’s Society Show in Paducah, KY. This was the first time I entered the show and it was wonderful to get a fat envelope in the mail on Saturday.  I’ve never been to Paducah and I’m thinking about trying to go to the show now, but I’ve discovered there’s no easy way to get there from here, so we’ll have to see.

As I mentioned in an earlier post when this quilt was accepted into the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival last month, “Playing with Colors” is part of a series of art quilts exploring the use of a simple improvisational block composed of different colors across the color spectrum. The other finished quilt in the series is “Playing with Crayons,” which you can see in the large quilts gallery on my website. I have another quilt in the series in process and several more in the drafting stage.  Having “Colors” going to Paducah makes me all the more excited about expanding the series.

I just received notification that “Playing with Colors” has been juried into the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival being held in Hampton, VA Feb. 26-March 1, 2009. This is the third year in a row that my work has been accepted there. I had already made plans to go to the show with my mom and my sister, so it will be even more fun with a quilt in the show.

“Playing with Colors” is part of a series of art quilts I’m working on that explores color across the color spectrum. It has more than 100 different batik  fabrics in it. I use a simple improvisational block that is cut into curves freehand with a rotary cutter and then reassembled. The batiks give a rich saturated glow to the colors, which seem to blend into each other from one row to the next. Free-motion quilting of a stylized daisy-like flower adds to the cheerful feel of the quilt.