Happy Valentine's Day: Queen of Hearts

This project began with a Moda charm pack I purchased last fall. I was able to start the quilt last week. I had make a very small portrait quilt with the woman having a heart shaped face, a heart shaped hair silhouette and a heart shaped dress neckline. I was headed in that direction including the heart shaped mouth which I used a few years back for the Day of the Dead quilt which was likeable. I have been watching, on PBS, plenty of British historical TV shows and the fashions influenced me as well as the Queen of Hearts character from the Alice in Wonderland book and movie. Throw in a little Steampunk fashions and I'm ready to draw up a design! I was on a quilt retreat last weekend and made sure this quilt lad priority!

I did a Pinterest search and discovered the cool queen-like collar as well as the dramatic eye makeup. The Queen of Hearts played by Helene Bohnam Carter in the Johnny Depp movie had very thin eye brows so my Queen got skinny brows too! I decided to make the quilt with six 5" squares wide and eight squares tall. I arranged the creams, reds, grays and a few blacks symmetrical with a mirror image. Since a charm pack has 42 squares I added a few dotted charm squares from another Moda pack and a few rotary cut batiks. I quilted the quilt with red thread for the dress and collar; variegated white/red/black thread for the background; variegated red/black thread for the hair and lights for the skin.

I did a lot of embellishments on this quilt:

1. The crown has beads on the peaks and a felt heart button in the middle.

2. The hair has red and white chunky nail polish.

3. The eyes have brown Drewent Inktense pencils to make the rises brown and a Pigma MIcron brown pen to add details. There is chunky red bling from Target on the lids and loose silver glitter/glue as eyeliner. A dab of white fabric paint for the eye reflection.

4. The cheeks have iridescent nail polish and red buttons sewn on them.

5. The mouth has chunky red nail polish to define the heart shape.

6. The collar has red metallic leather rick rack recently purchased at Target which is very fun and exciting to me! It was easy to work with and machine stitch to the collar.

7. The sleeves have a red/white trim on the band and another red/white trim as a bow on the outer edges.

8. The dress has red machine stitched hearts on he bodice as well as red buttons on the seam lines.

9. The ears have repurposed beads for earrings.

10. The background has red rhinestones glued on to it.

11. A red Pigma Micron pen used to draw a small heart spaced mole near one of the eyes. 

 This is a close up on the face and it is so pretty and blingy!

This is a close up view of the dress trims, buttons and rick rack.

Happy Valentine's Day to you!

2016 Hoffman Challenge Quilt: Summer Rainbow

This is my 2016 Hoffman Challenge entry titled "Summer Rainbow." The deadline to enter this challenge was extended from June 30th to July 5th so it was safe to post my quilt which I make over the winter. The fabric is digitally printed and for the first time there were two background colors, black or white, with a variety of different colored butterflies scattered about. I bought the black background but I cut out all the butterflies so it didn't really matter!!

I fused some Wonder Under to a large piece of the challenge fabric and fussy cut the butterflies out and began arranging them in a formation of a hairstyle. But I remembered making another portrait quilt with 12 quilt blocks from a block exchange and liked that hairstyle etc. The photo is posted near the end of this blog post. The quilt seemed like it was put in an odd category for entering in a quilt show because other people helped make the blocks so I never entered the quilt in a quilt show. I wanted to use the center portrait pattern again and this became my hair inspiration for this challenge! I separated the butterflies by color and placed the warm colored butterflies on the right and the cool colored butterflies on the left (mostly!) The small white butterflies became the "highlights" of the hair. I selected purple for the dress, a hot pink vinyl for the lips, a white tone on tone background that resembled a butterfly motif and a subtle floral batik for the outside border that compliments the colors without taking away from the portrait.

I used Cherrywood Hand Dyed fabrics for the 5 skin tones. I purchased another butterfly/bird/bug fabric and added the cute fussy cut hummingbird to the background. There are a few bees and dragonflies fussy cut and sporadically placed in the quilt.

I quilted the dress design as a continuation of the dress in the body of the quilt a la "coloring outside the lines!" The majority of the quilt is vertically echo quilted with a purple/hot pink/yellow/blue thread.

Embellishments include hologram sparkly nail polish on the brow bone and purple glitter polish on the eyelid, a mini pink rhinestone for the nose piercing, a purple Christmas ornament bead as an earring, some silver rhinestones in the white background and a variety of tiny beads in flower and butterfly shapes.

This is the original quilt.

Center of original quilt called Scarlet. I love the turquoise and red orange complementary color scheme!! I have to wait until July 18th to find out if this quilt is included in the 2016 Hoffman Challenge Traveling Exhibit. Time to go outside and play in my garden!

New Portrait Quilt: Raspberry Swirl

This is my newest portrait quilt. I was inspired by a cool hair color I discovered on Pinterest. I saved the photo and for the first time I used Microsoft Photoshop and posterized the image to separate the colors and values. I was playing around with Photoshop and thought I would see if it would help me out and save time. It did and I would use this feature again. I was also inspired by the color purple after Prince's passing and wanted to use it in the quilt. I used all but one fabric from the same line from Keep Me In Stitches in Appleton WI in the background. It is a tiny white square with different colored backgrounds-it looks like polka dots from a distance.

 

 

This is a detailed view of the face and some of the hair. I went crazy with detail for this project. I had 7-8 pinks, magentas and purple batiks for the hair and 5-6 skin tone colors as well. I used many different colors of thread in the hair area to connect the applique pieces and give the appearance of strands of hair. The mouth gave me a problem-she looked as if she had an under bite. To fix this I took a purple fabric marker on the bottom lip and "canceled" the excess out. Then when I was machine quilting the upper lip I added a bit extra and it is to my satisfaction and balanced!

To create the swirly circular background I cut a piece of muslin as the foundation piece and fused the different colors in place keeping the area where the portrait will be fused open.

This is the finished quilt top only. I added the purple border to pick up more of the purple. I thought about a floral batik with the coordinating colors but it was too busy and took away from the portrait. I used it for the binding!

This is the finish quilt blocked and sewn with a sleeve and label. Could I be done? Yes but embellishments are so fun-it's like wearing a garment and not adding jewelry or hair accessories. It is acceptable but the jewelry or embellishments add that extra zing!!

This is detail view of the hair and the ear. Ears are hard to do because they always have lots of parts to get the realistic appearance. The finished quilt has a few large flower shaped sequins sewn to the outer border and one became an earring. I enhanced the eye with fabric paint. I used two hologram nail polishes in the swirly parts of the background to accentuate the movement of the background. I was influenced by Prince's song Raspberry Beret and used it in the title of this quilt called "Raspberry Swirl!" It sounds like a flavor of ice cream and that's okay too!! I will enter it in the Wisconsin Quilt Expo which has a June 30th deadline for a September show. Next on the list is my Prince quilt which will be interesting since I have never made a male portrait quilt!!

My Quilt Is Featured In The April/May 2016 Quilters Newsletter Magazine!! Woo Hoo!

 I had seen a call for red themed quilts a while ago in 2015 from Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) because they were compiling quilts for a Go Red For Women Campaign. They put a lot of the quilts on their Pinterest board if you want to see many more red quilts. I found out my quilt "Beauty School Flashback" was selected to be in the April/May 2016 issue back last fall. It is difficult to wait and not tell anyone what is going on. I do not subscribe to this magazine and today I tried without success to purchase the magazine. I was bummed but then I check my mail today and I had a complimentary copy of Quilters Newsletter!! Sorry my photography isn't the greatest but the glossy paper tends to create a huge reflection.

 I have to say my quilt got an excellent position in the magazine layout and another photo of the detail of the lady's face. I made the quilt in 2010 for Joann Fabrics "Quilt Your Colors" Contest using only their fabrics (not easy when you want to use quilt shop fabrics!!) I came in 4th place nationally and was fortunate to win some prizes. Joann's never really promoted the end result of the contest and they never did the contest again. I blogged about this quilt back in the day so I'm not going to go into the construction of the quilt. It sure is a great felling to have my portrait quilt work in print!!

This is the cover in case you want to purchase it!

Art Quilts Around The World: Texture Challenge

Today is reveal day for my Facebook group Art Quilts Around the World. www.aroundtheworldin20quilts.blogspot.com. Our current challenge is about texture which is easy peasy because I use texture in many of my quilt through special occasion fabrics and embellishments. I went into my bridal/Las Vegas fabric stash and chose the "squeaky" plaid lame for the background, a brown hand dyed velvet for the hair, a new turquoise velvet from a vendor from United Kingdom at the Houston quilt show in October and an eyelash lame for the dress. I used hand dyed cottons and batik for the skin and facial features. I added a fun blue rick rack to the neckline to add more texture.

I used a chunky textured hologram-like nail polish on the brow bone and some loose iridescent turquoise shapes from the nail art department heavily on the eyelids. I added a rhinestone to the nose area also but I would have done that anyway!! I have a lot of quilting on the face to create another type of texture. I discovered that with the nap of velvet all quilting stitches were "buried" in the nap and didn't show up very well.  The next challenge is based on a favorite book and I have no ideas yet. I may choose a children's book. This challenge is due January 31, 2016.

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Bella Jordana: Salute to Women With Curly Hair

This is a new portrait quilt I made between preparing for the International Quilt Festival in Houston. I had drawn the design a few months ago and then let it sit for no real reason. When I attended the Quilt Expo in Madison WI in Sept. 2015 I found a charm pack with the "shabby chic" prints in a pink/green/turquoise/light brown color scheme. I unfortunately did not save the wrapper with the name. I thought of my daughter Jordana because of her curly hair and her love of these colors and the flowers. I pulled out the pattern and tweaked it a little and it came together. I wanted a Bella pattern with curly hair and I added an eyebrow, changed the face shape, mouth, nose width, added a separate eyelid applique piece and there is a full shoulder line.

I had some pink flower felt trim which I glued to the neck area for a necklace. I sewed three pink flower shaped buttons over the felt and added some glitter nail polish to the flower centers. I hand sewed pink beads to the rest of the felt trim.

This is a close up of the face. I quilted half of the face in a narrow cross hatch and the other in a curved echo stitch. I used only one thread for the ENTIRE quilting process-Sulky Blendables "Milk Chocolate" # 4011 in 30 weight. You can't go wrong with a thread named after chocolate!! The browns in this project did look like the brown in candy bars!! The rest of the embellishments include two large pink flowers from a large Hawaiian lei from Hobby Lobby taken apart with a button center, a rhinestone "nose piercing," hot pink chunky glitter nail polish on the mouth and a white fabric paint dot for the eye reflection. My favorite nail polishes are sitting in Houston watching for me so I will add some of those colors to the eye area when the quilt show is over and my box is shipped back home.  Should this quilt become my next pattern?

Art Quilts AroundThe World Reveal: Uniform

Today is reveal day for my Facebook art quilt group Art Quilts Around The World. The challenge theme was UNIFORM and I interpreted that as something being the same or having conformity. I prefer to make portrait quilts so I selected an Andy Warhol style with four of the SAME images of a woman and I call it "Pop Art Princess 3." What is the same in this quilt: The background; the sashing and the sashing quilting; the image of the woman; the stripe in the halter dress and the position of the stripe on the dress; the brow, lip and eye color; the variegated thread used for the skin tones; the glitter nail polish on the eye lids and the quilting on the images. What is NOT the same: The color of the hair, the skin tones and the glitter nail polish used to embellish the hair. The size of this quilt is 11.5" x 17.5"

Of the four images I like this one the best because the combination of values of the skin tone, lip and brow color seem to be the most flattering. In the upper left corner, the image with the lightest skin tones and the pink hair has too much eye brow contrast and she looks severe. Likewise the black woman in the lower right corner has too low of contrast and I can't hardly see her brows. This became a happy accident to use in my lecture on value. This situation shows how a medium color appears dark or light in relationship to the colors it is placed with.

This is my second favorite image because the woman appears serene. Even though I use the same applique pieces the women can look slightly different based on the fusing placement and the way I quilt it. The next challenge due November 30th is on TEXTURE which is a no-brainer because I use a variety of textures anyway in many of my quilts. I will now go back to prepping for my teaching job at IQF in Houston which is at the end of October!

New Work: Neon

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This is my latest portrait quilt. I was inspired by the hair color industry and the funky neon hair colors that are available in the cosmetology industry. I have been searching and purchasing neon fabric and embellishments since last fall and recently had the time to make this quilt. I really love the yellow print that I used for the dress and wanted to use more of it in the borders but since I do not like yellow in large quantities I chose to use this print for the backing fabric instead. The fabric for the lipstick and the pale yellow highlights was purchased while at the IQF Houston 2014 Show last October which gives me good memories! I used Cherrywood Hand Dyed Fabrics  for the gradation of 6 skin tone fabrics. They are hand dyed cottons and work very well for skin tones and are are equal to me as batiks. I purchased a fat quarter packet of browns for another project and love them to bits!!

I decided to take photos of the various steps of this portrait quilt to show how it come alive with each step of stitching, borders, fabric paint and embellishments. This is just the center of the quilt. I chose to cut some of the top off the center once it was completely fused because all the background was not needed.

This is the top with the various borders added. I love the swirly fabric on the left and bottom borders since it reminds me of the fashion designer Emilio Pucci! I fussy cut the directional pattern once I discovered there was a double direction. My cat Jack photo bombed this picture! Hi Jack!!

The quilt is quilted, bound and on cardboard being blocked. This is a step I only was taught about 4-5 years ago which changed my world because it will square up a quilt and make it lay flat. This is VERY important for having a quilt hang in a quilt show and the judges love a straight quilt without any wavy edges!!

I collected neon colored embellishments. I have a variegated orange/yellow ribbon, a fun neon colored decorative elastic, loose glitter, nail polish, rhinestones, and a variety of beads. I did not use everything which is the part that is hard because I have to use good taste and know when to stop adding more bling!!

This is the finished close-up of the face. I added the ribbon and elastic to the dress neckline; the loose glitter was used for eyeliner; rhinestones were used to make an earring; nail polish was used in the yellow of the hair to add to the highlights; rhinestones were added to the right and top borders and beads were sewn to outside of the binding. I intend to enter this quilt in a national quilt show and beyond!!

Sunglasses Wall Hanging-Bring on Summer!!

 I did a spin on my original Angelina pattern by making four of the same bobbed hair style, two skin tones, facial features and a few sun glasses and a Andy Warhol style placement to create a fun Summer wall hanging. I added two of the glasses I used in my pattern in this wall hanging so if you have purchased this pattern from me online, from one of my classes or when I was vending you can make this quilt. 
I'm not going to make any instructions-just go with it!! I found the fun sun glasses fabric locally at Pine Street Quilts and the idea came together. I originally had just the red sun glasses on one of the women and posted a photo on Facebook. One of my fine artist friends (Mary Mc.!) commented that she thought all four of the women should have sun glasses. I had considered this and went back and pulled a few of the different frame styles from the sun glasses fabric print and color coordinated it. I love to make the eyes on the portraits so to cover them up with the sun glasses seemed sad to me. I knew I wore my sun glasses on the top of my head and sometimes peeked out over them so that is how I positioned the sun glasses without sacrificing the eyes.

  I added a small amount of red glitter nail polish to all the lips, nail polish to eyelids and a few red rhinestones to the upper left sun glasses to get the retro look!

I had most of this wall hanging finished but used it in the Open Studio at the International Quilt Festival March 28, 2015 in Chicago as a demo for my portrait quilt presentation. I was antsie to finish the wall hanging because I am personally ready for warm weather and it will be a seasonal quilt on my wall very soon!!

Art Quilts Around the World Challenge: Structure

I am in an online art quilt group called Art Quilts Around the World and our current challenge called Structure has it's reveal today. The group's website is aroundtheworldin20quilts.blogspot.com. 

I had a hard time with this theme because I view art quilts as unstructured and traditional quilts as structured. I pondered this idea for over a month then had an aha moment of realizing I liked to make half square triangles and I also like the Modern quilt Movement with its use of chevrons. I began with the white fabric with the large colorful polka dots. I selected six of the seven colors, eliminating the gray, and white for the portrait applique color. I arranged the vertical chevrons so the navy was on the outside for a nice border edge. I like the echo quilting used in modern quilts so I did this with the machine quilting of the chevrons.

The group determines the size of our challenge quilts to be 11.5" x 16.5" but I needed to enlarge this quilt to 12" x18" to work with a HST sized at 3." I may never actually show this or any of the other challenge quilts to the group so I made this executive decision to deviate from the original size because I have to love the quilt or why bother making it.

This is the closeup of the face which was quilted with a tiny stipple stitch between the quilting lines to detail the face. I embellished with nail polish, a rhinestone "nose piercing," a fabric yo-yo from the binding fabric and a large button. I love this quilt and it looks structured.

I enjoyed the process so I made another quilt for my local quilt guild's biennial quilt show April 25-26, 2015 using batik scraps from the raffle quilt. same pattern and same vertical chevron placement. Same fabric yo-yo hair flower. I added a small border to the outside

  since there was no rules!!

I do not work with pastels very often so it was a welcome change.

Neon Pop Art Portrait Quilt

 My eye was drawn to this border fabric when I was in Green Bay WI in October teaching a class. As a child, and a fan of art, I always loved this piece of art by Pierre Mondrian. In the 1960s the fashion industry used it for mini dresses (Twiggy!) I decided to use it in a new variation of my Line Drawing pattern. Instead of a pieced background I selected color color, black, and pulled the four colors from the print (white, yellow, red and blue) as the colors of the applique. I arranged the blocks similar to an Andy Warhol pop art piece with 2 portraits on top and two on the bottom. I moved the applique pieces so that each block had all four colors in each block. I played with how I would set the blocks with borders and sashings. In the end I decided additional borders and sashings were too busy and just sewed them together and added the bold border.. The quilt has enough activity so I just raw edged stitched the applique in the color coordinating color; the background was quilted in black and the facial features were quilted in the dominant color of each block's applique. This quilt will be used as a future pattern as well as a great teaching tool in my Color Confidence for Quilters Class. It is a great example of contrast, warm and cool colors and straight/curved lines.

I love to embellish my quilts but this quilt was telling me to be minimal so I only added the reflection dot to each set of eyes-white for all but the white batik which received a dot of black. Then each portrait got a rhinestone "nose piercing' in the dominant color in each block.

The border fabric was outline quilted on the black lines of the print. It has a modern feel to it and reminds me of the 1980s video by the pop group Wham for the song "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go!" Do You remember that video?

Bella Valora: Exploring the Color Wheel and Value

While teaching my Bella pattern class in October I had a student who did a different color scheme than I had explored. I have made 6-7 Bella quilts either using a one color (monochromatic) or a multicolor color scheme. I have another pattern and class I teach called "Fifteen Shades of Gray" which is the third photo in this blog. It has 15 very light to medium values of gray with three bright coordinating batiks as the applique colors for a different portrait quilt project. The student selected 24-25 gray squares and one color (blue) for the applique. This gave me the idea to combine the gray values from the Fifteen Shades of Gray pattern with the Bella pattern but instead of only one color applique I did a multicolor/color wheel color scheme. I chose warm colors (reds, oranges and yellows) for the hair and cool colors (blues, greens, turquoise and purples) for the facial features. I chose one white tone-on-tone fabric and 24 values of gray in this project. I placed the lightest values near the face and faded to darker values away from the face. I did separate the chin/neck/lower hair pattern into two sections because I wanted both blue violet and purple. My favorite color is pink so I put both magenta and pink in the hair applique. I added a gold for a small hair strand and would not do that again but use yellow orange instead like I used in the small curls in the lower part of the hair. I thought the YO was prettier than the gold.

The construction of the quilt is the same as the other Bella quilts. I changed the thread color for each coordinating piece of applique and used the same thread color to add quilting to the areas near the applique piece. I quilted the gray background/face/neck with a light gray thread.

I embellished with a blue nail polish on the open area of the mouth-turquoise glitter was added to the eyelid area. I glued a few rhinestones in the left sided background area. I auditioned hair flowers and beads for a necklace as I did in some of the other Bella quilts but it looked tacky and busy. I repeated the multicolor in the cute striped binding fabric.

Valora is the feminine version of the Italian word for value.

My Bella pattern is available from my website at www.laurieceesay.com.

This is Bella Chroma which explores the colors of the color wheel. Still one of my favorite color schemes!

This is the sample for my Fifteen Shades of Gray Class which is smaller at 12' square. Bella is 22.5" square.

I learned my students inspire me and see colors in a different way and it's all good to feed creativity off of each other!

CLAW: Crossing The Line_Artists at Work; An Online Art Quilt Group

I joined an online art quilt group through the Yahoo Group from Studio Arts Quilters Association created by Karen Musgrave back in the summer of 2012. We are named CLAW which is Crossing the Line_Artists at Work,  Karen is the mastermind/curator of the group and she has the hard part of finding galleries and venues for our quilt exhibits. We have 20 art quilters involved and every 6 months we have a theme and a size of 18"w x 24'l and we can create our quilts to our liking as long as we follow these simple guideline. I have only met Karen and two other quilters in this group and we correspond through our Yahoo group. The mission statement of the group is "CLAW is a group of fiber arts who believe that art has the power to transform thinking and inspire people to act. We are committed to creating art that deals with women and social issues for exhibition.

There have been four themes or collections so far. Karen had asked us up until recently to keep our work private but is now allowing us to share our work on our blogs.

 

The first photo is from our first collection called Women Who Broke All The Rules. I chose Ruth Handler who invented the Barbie doll as my rule breaker. I also chose Ruth because I love Barbie dolls and still collect them today and Ruth was the first toymaker to create a fashion doll for girls to play with. Up until this time girls strictly played with baby dolls. She was completely successful and the Mattel Company has flourished partially due to the Barbie doll. I needed to stay away from anything with the Barbie logo but I embraced the hot pink that is Barbie's signature color-the back of the quilt is fun too! 

The second quilt is from the collection called Art Can't Hurt You. This subject matter is about social issues and I chose racial injustice. My daughter is biracial and we have plenty of stories of people being confused and/or saying stupid things because they assume and judge us only by skin color. I used to say "I'm the Mother!" because people didn't "get" it. I chose various values of pink for our hair, skin tones and clothes because that is our favorite color. This quilt is my favorite of the four pieces because it is so personal and I used my two favorite colors-hot pink and lime green!

The third quilt is from the collection called Rewriting Art History. We were to select a female artist who was innovative in the art world. I chose Michalene Thomas who is a female black artist who is currently living in New York and creates very graphic and bright portraits of black women often with a 1970s look to them. She also embellishes her paintings with rhinestones and jewelry. I selected Michalene as my subject because I love her use of bright colors, mixing various patterns and doing portraits as her subject matter.

And lastly is my quilt the fourth collection called 20 Quilts which explores emotions and actions. I chose LAUGH because it is a positive action based on humans experiencing something funny. When I think of a huge laugh I envision a big toothy smile and crinkled up eyes. I added a yellow background because psychologically yellow is cheery. I positioned laugh, chuckle, tee hee and lol, which is text lingo for laugh out loud, to the background in a subtle way with another yellowish  batik. The whole quilt has a warmness to it which seems happy and positive. This is no particular woman-just that I prefer brown hair with highlights, red lipstick and bright colored clothes!

Soon Karen will announce the next subject for the fifth collection. We have about 6 months to design and complete our quilts.

If I am correct the first collection, which I have the Ruth Handler quilt in, will be at the Mancuso Quilt Fest in Denver May 1-4, 2014. That is exciting news for our group. I will have another quilt at that quilt show as well so I am doubly thrilled by the exposure!!