RAIN GARDEN sold at International Quilt Festival

I received a notice yesterday that my quilt RAIN GARDEN had been purchased at the International Quilt Festival in Houston. I feel honored that someone loved it enough to take it home! The idea for the piece came from my husband's plans to create a rain garden in our backyard. Since this quilt was finished our rain garden has made great progress. It is full of native plants that like lots of water and promises to be a thing of beauty next summer.

CALAMITY JANE

I've just completed another pet portrait. Calamity Jane is the beloved pet of a friend's daughter and she commissioned this portrait as a gift for her. This was a challenging piece since the dog is primarily one color but some highlights and shadows in the original picture helped.

My quilt label includes the original picture of the dog. She had been swimming and was wet and happy.

I've received a couple of excellent books recently that are of great assistance as I work to improve my skills using Photoshop Elements. The first is "Next Steps in Altered Photo Artistry" by Beth Wheeler. The book is well-written and well-organized and is a real asset if you like to manipulate photos. The other is "Artistic Photo Quilts" by Charlotte Ziebarth. This book gets into some more technical operations to alter photos and is very useful. Both books are focused on printing photos on fabric which is not my aim. But they are wonderful in helping to develop a picture into an inspiration for a quilt.

My First Portrait of a Person

BOB SINGS ( 17" x 18") This was my first experiment in trying to create a portrait of a person. I used a picture of my husband as he was singing that is one of my favorites. My fabric choices didn't turn out so well - he really doesn't have any odd skin conditions - but the picture actually does look like him a lot. So I'll call it a success and prepare to try another one.

NELLIE (10" X 12") Nellie lives next door to me with the Hatch family. She is getting very old so I thought a portrait of her might be welcome. I did a lot of thread-painting on this but it doesn't seem to show up very well. She is a mostly white cat so trying to add some dimension and texture was challenging.

Casey the Firecracker Dog

My neighbors have a Jack Russell who is crazy for fireworks. His "Dad" sets off bottle rockets for him every evening and Casey runs around the yard like a mad dog then leaps into the air like he's on a spring until Brad shoots off another one. Trying to get a picture of this little maniac was very challenging. As you can tell, I'm still enjoying creating the pet portraits. If you want your pet pictured in fabric, I will take commissions through Waverly House at 417.882.3445.

Clio the Beautiful

I thought creating the dog portraits was fun - but a calico cat is even better. This is Clio and she is a beauty and made a great subject for a pet portrait. You would think I'd be getting tired of this by now but I am seeing more and more possibilities for this technique. Stay tuned.

Still going to the dogs

This little quilt is based on my friend Vivian's dog, Barbee. Barbee is not a pup but somehow I've brought out her inner child. I found it much more difficult to work with a more limited color range. Next I am going to try a cat portrait - Merrilee's Clio. I'll post when it is finished.

Another dog quilt

The last dog portrait I did was so much fun that I had to do another. Now I'm taking pictures of the cat that lives to the south of me and the dog to the north. Their owners are looking forward to having their personalized pet portraits. And I'm looking forward to having more fun.

Seamus the Wonder Dog

This wee quilt (11" x 14") is a gift for Vivian's daughter. She is bonkers over her beagle. And she's coming to visit in August so I pirated a picture of Seamus from her blog and interpreted him in cloth. I think it is funny and it was certainly fun to put it together. I recently received Leni Levinson Weiner's "Photo-Inspired Art Quilts" and combined some of her techniques with those in Marilyn Belford's book "Portraits for Fabric Lovers".

This was a great exercise to get me back to work (play) with my quilts. Now I think I'm going to roam the neighborhood taking pictures of the neighbors' cats and dogs because I have to do more of these fun little pieces.

Something New from Something Old

SPIRAL LONE STAR (52" x 52")
I have been very uninspired over the past few weeks. So I dug out my one UFO - I think I started it five years ago. I had the star diamonds and the appliqued squares finished so I sewed them together and added another fabric to make it square. Then I had something to quilt and keep myself entertained. It actually took almost two weeks to finish - certainly not all that time to quilt but a lot of time nevertheless. This was a nice opportunity to try out lots of Karen McTavish's quilting motifs. I usually don't like stippling but even used my own loopy brand of that technique in the outside setting fabric. Now I have nothing left to quilt so I'm going to have to do something to get the creativity going again.

LATE BLOOMER Finds a New Home

I had the good fortune of reconnecting with an old friend by way of Facebook recently. Last week, she was in Springfield and we got to catch up with one another. Wow, it is so great to spend time with someone who "knew you when" and who you enjoy just as much now.

I told my friend about my late life passion for art quilting and showed her some of my work. Today I learned she had contacted Waverly House Gallery and is now the owner of my favorite (and largest!) work - Late Bloomer. So congratulations to Cheryl for giving my quilt a new home and congratulations to me for letting go of it.