Weze Davis's artistry

"Supper" is in my poetry collection, Semisweetness and Light.  Weze Davis e-mailed this photo to me a few months ago and remarked on how much she liked this poem.  How cool is that?  And the color play is wonderful.  Semisweetness and Light is still available, as is my 2003 Grace: A Memoir.  Leave a comment, and I'll get back to you quickly.

Pansy fiber art

I love contemporary fabrics in all their diversity -- especially the conversational prints (although I'm most drawn to the "novelty" subsection) -- and keep experimenting with ways to use them well in fiber art -- something that pays attention to the print but goes beyond the ordinary. This piece was fun -- can't quite explain why the word "pansy" demanded to be embroidered in that way, but what are ya gonna do?

This piece is in a private collection.

Rugged Cross -- God owns heaven

From the Rugged Cross series.

I started with the green fabric for the cross and the weeds for the background. As I stitched, the line "God owns heaven ... something-something ... earth" kept flitting through my mind.

A friend provided the source: the Anne Sexton poem "The Awful Rowing toward God," from Sexton's book of the same name. I did a paper on Sexton while in undergraduate school and probably hadn't thought about her in 20 years. Who knew this line was still in a mental filing cabinet?

The line in full, which is embroidered in barely visible text on the piece, is "God owns heaven...but ... craves the earth."

Rugged Cross -- Last Leaf

Another piece in my Rugged Cross series.

This piece, like the others I'm working on now, are pieced, quilted, embroidered, and finished by hand.

Rugged Cross - Blessed Assurance

I'm working on a series of fiber art pieces called Rugged Cross.


I learned in 1994 in an American Church History class that in North Carolina KKK meetings opened with the singing of the old, melodious, and well-loved hymn "The Old Rugged Cross." Russel Richey, who taught the class, had researched the KKK in the sixties; he and an associate attended some meetings and smuggled a tape recorder in with them, and he played the opening hymn for our class. It shows that religion can be used for whatever ends a person has in mind.

This piece came about when I told a friend that I was working on a Rugged Cross series, and she replied, "I don't need another rugged cross. I'm looking for some blessed assurance." ("Blessed Assurance" is an 1873 hymn written by Fanny Jane Crosby and, according to Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal, is one of the ten most popular hymns sung by United Methodists. )

This piece is in a private collection.

Party time fiber art

I'd been working with soft colors for quite some time when I decided to do this piece. I did everything by hand -- piecing, quilting, and embroidery -- to my own surprise. I'm having a spell in which I'm at the computer long hours, and the last thing I want to do is sit in front of another machine (even a sewing machine) at the end of the day.

I began with the black background and trimmed, pieced, and stitched all the bits on it. I put all of the knots on the front. I'd been reading about communication theories and journalistic ethics , but I don't know that the concept of full disclosure is the reason behind the visible knots. But I like them.

A horse is a horse

I made a horse quilt for his birthday, using a photo I took as the basis for embroidering and appliquing.  Next tyime, I may work with solid colored fabric and use nothing but embroidery for the mane and highlights. This time, though, I'm satisfied; time was running out for finishing a quilt to be hauled around inside and out.

More Heart-2-Heart

Some additional pieces for Heart-2-Heart.

You can learn more about Heart-2-Heart at http://quilts.com.

Fabric Valentines -- Instructions!

I'm donating these 4x6 fiber art pieces to the Heart-2-Heart project, an effort to collect postcard-sized fiber art to give to wounded military personnel at Walter Reed Hospital on Valentine's Day, 2007.
If the project receives more donations than needed, the extras will go to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
The free-form heart method is simple and fun. Here's how I did it.
1. Cut fabric into a 4 x 6 rectangle.
2. Fold the rectangle in half and cut out a free-form heart. Set the heart outside for another project. You'll be working with the 4x6 rectangle with the heart-shaped hole.
3. Place the rectangle on top of a piece of novelty fabric and move it around until you're happy with what you see inside the heart.
4. Use a glue stick, sparingly, to bond the two fabrics temporarily.
5. Cut away the excess novelty fabric.
6. Attach the piece you've created to batting with a wee bit of glue.
6. Stitch around the outside edge of the heart. I do this by hand, but you could also use a machine.
7. Add embellishments as desired.
8. Finish off the edges. I did bound edges, but as an alternative you can zig-zag or satin stitch around the edges.
9. Glue to a piece of card stock or other stiff material.

Heart-2-Heart art

Heart-2-Heart: a collection of 4x6 fabric art pieces that will be distributed on Valentine's Day to wounded military personnel at Walter Reed Hospital.

I love novelty fabrics and thought these were especially cheery. I did all of the stitching by hand.

Happy Hands quilt

My partner is one of six children. I used tracings of his hand and those of his siblings to cut out the pieces. The two handprints on the bottom, supporting the whole, are their parents'.

purple log cabin

This log cabin block is 10.5 x 10.5 inches. I worked it earlier this summer but wasn't satisfied with it until today, when I added the flower, the stem, and the Alice Walker quotation about noticing the color purple in a field.

Cease fire cross

I'm donating this piece to the Women's Center at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary for their sale on Friday, December 1, 2006, to raise funds for the Katie Geneva Cannon Lecture Series. It is approximately 10 inches by 14 inches, hand- and machine-pieced and hand-quilted and embroidered.

The piece gets its name from a sliver of fabric on the right crossbar. The sliver was cut from a fabric patterned with newspaper headlines/text and reads "nam cease fire agree...".

'Twas brillig

The theme for this month's online art quilt challenge was the Lewis Carroll poem"Jabberwocky." The challenge was to create an evocative piece using different textures.
I've been fascinated by the word "brillig" ever since I was in grade school, so that's what I had in mind in putting this piece together. While I was stitching the gold, I realized that brillig suggests both dank and glittery to me. There's a bit of slithy tove in the piece as well.
The piece is an irregular 6 x 10 inches.

Halloween JT

I'm part of an online challenge quilt group -- this month's piece was "fall colors" -- which for me means Halloween -- I started with a photo I'd taken of my daughter's horse JT and decided to see if I could approximate him, in pumpkin, candy corn, and abstract fabrics. It was an excellent adventure; I did a number of things I'd never done before:

1. I enlarged and photocopied the photo and used a technique I learned (and haven't used since) in 1969, where you pin successive layers of fabric wrong side up to the photocopy, stitch around the distinct sections, and trim off the excess fabric. Ordinarily you zigzag around it, but I just did a straight stitch.

2. I chose the photo because I wanted to work with something that had a VERY clear foreground and background.

3. I chose to limit myself to fabrics already in my stash. I don't have any solids, and I don't have any browns (the color of the actual horse), and I didn't have enough Halloween print variations to do the shading I wanted to. Also, a couple of the shapes got out of whack when I machine stitched them on, because I need (big news here) better lighting.
4. In two places, I put the fabric on wrong side up (meaning right side up), which added an extra element of "ack" to the whole project.
5. Since I couldn't get the shading I wanted from the fabrics, I decided to use embroidery floss and hand-stitching on JT. This is also my 3-D element. The only place it REALLY shows up on the piece is the highlight over his eye. Oh,yeah, and last night I had a purple fabric paint pen in my hand and so daubed a bit on his shouler and chest where shadows show in the photo...

6. There's tulle over everything but the sky and the horse, because the background colors (two grasses and the orange forest) seemed too bright; I wanted more contrast with the foreground horse.

7. I decided when I added the inner white border to do what I've heard mentioned numerous times: to measure when I finished the first side to see if I was actually sewing a 1/4 inch seam. Nope. It was a wavery line, from 1/4 through 1/2 to 5/8. So then I did that trick where you measure 1/4 inch from the needle (imagine that), and then put a pad of sticky notes to help keep sewing in a straight line. My variations still existed but were less extreme. I improved with the bats (second) border and then improved even more with the binding. I actually was able to see, for the first time, just how much a pin distorts the fabric.

8. I chose the borders and binding by trial and error. I love this part, because it's always satisfying to see which fabric deadens the piece, which does nothing for it, and which contributes to the whole. The white inner border made a critical difference in lightening up the whole picture, and in bringing out the shimmer in the tulle. And the bats border was to show that the choice of Halloween fabrics for JT was intentional.

9. I knew after I attached JT's nose that this was not going to turn out the way I'd intended, but I decided to keep going anyhow... the "make it work" principle from Project Runway" -- or, if not "make it work," then "follow it through to its conclusion." I found great freedom in continuing to work on a piece that was never going to please me... I wouldn't have tried the tulle or the fabric marker if it had been working out well.

10. The quilting is by hand. There's very little of it, because I don't like the look of quilting stitches. (!)

11. I finished it -- all the way down to attaching those little triangles of fabric at two corners on the back so it can be hung.

12. I like this piece less well than other pieces I've done, but I learned ever so much from the things that didn't work quite right.

Hands Down

I had great fun making this piece for the "A Show of Hands" exhibit coming up at the International Quilt Festival in November. These touchable quilts will be hung from the ceiling, so both the front and back will show. At the end of the Festival, all the pieces will become part of the permanent collection of Creative Spirit Center in Midland, Michigan. My own and my beau's hand were the templates. I fused them to muslin with Timtex, used Pigma pens to document the story of our meeting, and then did the embroidery and binding by hand. It's an irregular (two-hand) shape, and the largest dimensions are 10.5 x 14 inches.

Semi-sweetness and Light cover art

Night before last I stitched this piece while sitting on the couch talking with my beau.

I handed it to him when I finished, and he said, "That's it" -- certain this is right for the cover. I was still a bit unsure until, seeing it in his hands, the phrase "and the glory of the Lord shone all around" popped into my head. The piece is 4 x 6, as are all of the fiberart postcards.

The book designer will play with typefaces and sizes for the cover, so rather than doing those in fabric and adhering them, I simply printed them on paper and taped them on -- just to get a sense of whether I'd like it. I do -- so much so that I may do a larger version for the fun of it. Stitching with yellow on a rich shade of purple like this is a satisfying endeavor.

The plot thickens

I bought the army fabric because my beau is former military. As of yesterday, 2700 American lives have been lost in Iraq.







Nice horsie. I took the photo and did all of the stitching by hand.








GoldenTree Communications will publish my new poetry collection, Semi-sweetness and Light, this fall. When owner Debra Landwehr Engle saw my fabric postcards, she decided I should make the cover for the book. My first effort was too busy for a book cover, but I like the "Still a great deal of light" variation.

More fiber postcards

Then I got into the swing of things and made a few more postcards for FFAC:
Summertime
Yes
Love You
Kitty

Fiber art postcards

I started making quilts last November and recently decided to take part in Fiberart for a Cause, which is on target to have donate $100,000 to the American Cancer Society in less than 2 years. You can read all about it and see some wonderful art at www.virginiaspiegel.com. FFAC will have more than 2000 fabric postcards, from artists around the world, for sale at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, in November. Chicken Scratch was my first effort. From This Day Forward was the second.