“Salsa” Accepted at “Tribute to Fiber Art” Show
Friday, February 6th, 2009
“Salsa” has been accepted into the 2009 “Tribute to Fiber Art” show at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD. The show runs from March 4 through April 9 with an opening reception on Saturday, March 7 from 5:30-7:30 pm. The gallery is open Monday-Friday 10-5 and Saturday 10-2. BlackRock is located at 12901 Town Commons Drive in Germantown. I’m excited to be part of the show and I hope you can stop by next month and see it after it opens.
“Salsa” is part of a series of art quilts I’m working on using freeform circle blocks. The circle blocks are quilted with a sunburst design and there are different quilting motifs in the four quadrants of the quilt to add interest to the plain sections. 
The quilt is attached to a blue background and mounted on stretcher bars like a painter’s canvas so it hangs on the wall like a picture. I’ve been using this treatment for some of my art quilts for the past year and I like the presentation. Adding the additional background fabric gives me another opportunity to add dimension to the piece. For “Salsa” the blue background really makes the design pop because it complements the orange that bisects the piece. The blue is the same fabric that is used in the circle blocks so it gives a nice sense of continuity.
I’ve started a new series of art quilts using hand dyed fabrics from Cherrywood Fabrics. I bought a grab bag of small pieces at a show last year and decided to play with them by choosing colors and randomly cutting the pieces into strips. I sewed some of the strips together, cut them into random widths, then sewed the new pieces together again. What I ended up with was a really fun small art quilt that was pure color. I faced the quilt instead of binding it and hand quilted circles and lines on it with perle cotton. Then I attached it to a backing fabric and stretched the whole thing over an 8×10 artist’s canvas so it hangs like a picture. This one is called “Study in Blue,” because I started out with mostly blues ranging from baby blue to blue violet. As I was composing the piece, I threw in some orange and red for contrast, plus one square of lime green because I couldn’t resist. It was incredibly freeing to just let the colors and shapes talk to each other as I was sewing the pieces together.