For me, July has been a month for mulling over. I keep a small notebook close at hand and write down snippets of thoughts, key words and strands of ideas. This is as close as I get to a sketchbook. So all these new ideas are just marinating in my head and in my collection of interesting cloth that I pull out from day to day, just to look at and think about. I bought a few scraps of beautiful red wool at the Waste Shed in Chicago last week to save for winter sewing. They also had a nice selection of pre-owned DMC perle cotton that I jumped on. I have also been experimenting with rust dying on my vintage linens. So many vintage linens…
Terretorial Road: Crosses and Losses , 2018
I was very excited to have my quilt Terretorial Road:Crosses and Losses accepted for the Surface Design Association exhibit Beyond the Surface. The exhibit will be at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild during the SDA conference in St. Louis, MO in early October. I had already registered for the conference, so this is a nice boost to have a work in one of many wonderful fiber exhibits that will be on view for the conference days.
Starched and Pressed will be exhibited at the Swope Museum in Terre Haute, IN in their 75th Annual Wabash Valley Exhibition, September 6 - October 20, 2019.
“The Territorial Road is a work inspired by a diary entry, written by Susan Brackney Clayton in 1890. From a sod house on a homestead near Elton, Nebraska, her words tell of beauty in the expanse of land and sky, the constantly howling wind, loneliness and a deep longing for a life left behind in Indiana. This piece is called Crosses and Losses, after a patchwork pattern dating back to the time of westward expansion, speaking to hardship and the isolation of a woman uprooted. ”
Summer Reads:
Here are a few books I have enjoyed recently:
The Dreamers, by Karen Thompson Walker; The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan; Naive. Super, by Erlend Loe; Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson; Mr. Flood’s Last Resort, by Jess Kidd.