"Eclipse" - Scrappy Improvisational Quilt

When my brother, Thom Atkins, visited last fall, he showed me (and a few quilting buddies) his new method for designing and constructing "scrappy improv wall quilts," a technique that turned out to be a lot of fun for me, especially given my long history with an improvisational, intuitive approach to bead embroidery.

Basically, what we did was to empty our bags or boxes of scraps onto a large table and start pawing through them, pulling out ones that appealed to us at that moment. For me it was all about color - red, magenta, fuchsia, with hints of pink, golden-yellow, orange, lavender, and dark green. All of the fabrics were in my scrap box. We had two days of Thom's demonstrations and guidance. During that time, each of us in our small group produced a unique and very pleasing "piece" or "block," measuring roughly 18 x 21 inches, the size of a fat quarter.

One of my red scraps, cut in a nice arc at one end, was the start of it all because I liked the shape and the color. Next I picked up a small strip of yellow, and held it behind the arc of red. Ooooh! Nice enough to repeat. The scrap of orange/red batik was large enough to cut a similar arc, and the strip of yellow was long enough to go behind that one too. These two arcs formed the basis of my piece.

You can see the two arcs above; the lower right was the first. The yellow strip was only about 3" wide, not enough to go all the way around the arcs, but I cut two shapes that would echo the top of each of the arcs. I layered the remaining scraps from that on top of the arcs along the vertical edges of the design. Then I put a dark green scrap behind the arcs and the yellow, which set them off nicely. The rest was just filling to the edges of the quilt with more scraps, including fussy-cut leaves and flowers.

The next step was to glue it all together along the 1/4" seam overlap, working in layers from bottom to top, and cutting away the excess fabric from the underside after each piece is glued. Cutting away the excess fabric leaves a double layer of fabric only at the seams; the rest is a single layer. The glue is Elmer's School Glue, Disappearing Purple, as shown below. It is an organic stick glue, relatively easy to sew through, repositionable, (in case you change your mind), and purple when first applied, drying to transparent (so you can see where exactly you are putting it).

Thom's method is a type of raw edge applique, typically accomplished with heat-fusible web, such as "wonder under." The typical method, given a complex, layered design such as mine, would have resulted in a thick, stiff, multi-layer surface, which would be difficult to quilt, even with a machine. In Thom's method, there is no web, and in most places only one or two layers of fabric. Like all raw edge techniques, the raw edges must be sewn down, and the resulting quilts are not very suitable for bed quilts unless there is heavy stitching over the raw edges (for example, dense, zig-zag, machine stitching).

After gluing my original (shown above) quilt top, I assembled the quilt, using a spray glue to layer the backing, batting and top. The next step was to stitch along the "seams," the overlapping, glued edge of each piece. From there, it was up to each of us as to how to finish the quilt, perhaps with machine quilting, such as stippling or contour stitches, or perhaps with beading, all of which Thom does on his quilts.

A couple of months went by after getting to the unfinished stage shown above. I liked it, but didn't know what to do with it, until one day when I was at our Senior Center, getting foot care from a trained nurse who comes a couple times a week to help those who need it. Her treatment room, about the size of a walk-in closet, has no windows. Her client faces the door to the room, a plain, wooden door.  "That door needs a quilt," I told her. The rest is history; my scrappy improv quilt, Eclipse,  hangs there now.

Only first I had to finish it. Above is the finished quilt, Eclipse. Below I'll tell you some of the finishing steps and about how I transformed it from looking flat and ordinary to sharp and textured using embroidery embellishments. Please click on the photo so you can see the details!

You might have noticed that the finished quilt is longer (better suited for hanging on a door) than the original piece. That was a challenge, although less than you might expect, because Thom had demonstrated for us how he sometimes extends the size of his quilts. In short, I roughly planned out the addition, the mock-up shown below, then created it using the same process and scraps as the original piece.

I used fusible "tape" made for butt-joining pieces of batting, to add a new piece of batting to the bottom edge of batting on the original (upper) part of the quilt. The horizontal strip of striped fabric overlaps the two parts of the quilt and the joined batting underneath. As you can see below, I added a fussy-cut flower over the striped fabric to break up the horizontal strip and visually join the two parts.

Confession time... I'm not good at machine quilting, and don't even have a proper quilting foot for my old machine (1972 Pfaff). I tried stitching around the fussy cut flowers to secure the glued edges, but failed miserably. What to do? Ah, hand-sew with embroidery stitches and floss? Yes! It took a few tries, but eventually I found stitch and thread combinations that worked.

It looked so good that I decided to add stitching and knots to the yellow arcs next. Wow! That popped the eclipse look! In the photo below, you can see bits of all the embroidery stitches I added. Not only does the embroidery provide embellishment and emphasis, it also further quilts the piece. Click the photo to see the detail and better read the stitch identification.

Here are two more detail photos of the finished quilt (without the text boxes).

Lots of fun, and I like the results! Will I do another one? Well, right now I've finally returned to my hexie project, where I'm likely to remain for many months, but after that, scrappy improv may be just what I need!

Brother & Sister: Both Quilters & Beaders

My brother, Thom Atkins, is a very talented quilt and bead artist!

He's written a popular book about how to make beaded quilts.

Recently he sent me a wonderful birthday present - a box of his scraps to use for making hexie flowers for my in-progress, hand-pieced, hexie quilt. Forty-nine different fabrics makes quite a stack of flowers.

Here they are again, this time arranged on a flat surface (click photo to enlarge for details). It's way fun to play with the flowers, re-arranging them in different ways, re-stacking them, and then spreading them out again.

All the while I was cutting, basting, and stitching these flowers I was thinking about Thom, about our history and our mutual love of stitching. I recognized most of the fabrics. One was in a quilt we made 19 years ago for our mom's 80th birthday. Some were from blouses, dresses, shirts he made for himself and his wife. Some were from pillows and other home decor he made for their home. Some were from his early quilts. Most of them brought up a ton of memories for me!

I always like (and sometimes love) things that Thom makes, and yet I've also noticed when we are in a fabric store together, we do not gravitate toward the same fabrics. I wouldn't have guessed that I would use almost every one of the fabric scraps he sent. There were a few that were too glitzy, had a stronger metallic look than I like. But 90% or more could have come from my own stash. That's how much I like them.... leaving me to conclude that we are more alike than I thought.

Here we are as kids... book ends.  Me 16 months older than him.

What's it like when brother and sister, close in age, are both quilters and beaders, both of us entering our quilts in shows, both of us teaching workshops and writing books?

Are we competitive?

A little, but not very much in my opinion. I admit to being a little "nervous" when he took up bead embroidery a few years after I make it the focus of both my art and my career. In artistic matters, he has a quicker learning curve than I do, rapidly achieving excellence in any medium he tries.

The fact that he likes bling and representational, while I like matte and symbolic, makes our work look different, which helps. We're also very different in our approach to quilt designing. While I am heavily influenced by traditional quilts, his quilts are all "art quilts." Most of his are heavily beaded, while mine are mostly not. Right from the start, he usually has a complete "picture" in his mind of what his quilt will look like when finished; whereas I rarely have a clue what mine will be like until I'm nearly finished with it.

Nor have we had issues with our teaching. I mostly teach beaders, emphasizing bead embroidery techniques rather than projects. He mostly teaches quilters, concentrating on methods for sewing beads onto quilts. There are enough teaching opportunities for both of us to accept as many gigs as we can handle.

What's the best thing about our mutual passions for beading and quilting?

Well, we talk on the phone for hours at a time about our current projects. Our conversations would bore everybody else in our families to death, but for us it's exciting to share our ideas, challenges, and victories. We do it often! It seems each of us has always respected the artistic sensibility and skills of the other. It's great to have somebody you can count on to say, "That's really wonderful," when you show them your latest work.

We also share information about photography, opportunities for showing our quilts, inspirations, promotion of our books, and countless other related things. We help each other to solve problems and to grow artistically.

It seems pretty ideal; was it always like that?

If you've read my first book, One Bead at a Time, available here as a free download, you know that Thom grew up favored to be the artist in the family, showing his talents at a very early age. My bend was more academic, although I had no clear pathway. After majoring in art in college, Thom rapidly became established as an artist. After majoring in English and psychology, I muddled around in a couple of careers for many years. I didn't discover my passion for beading or start to think of myself as an artist until I was 46 years old. Until then I always admired Thom's art, but didn't relate directly to him about it. I'm glad it is different now; glad we are both talented and creative... together!

Finished "Chicks" Quilt (Sue Spargo Wool Applique)

A week of finishing!!! Oh my, it feels good to finish things, doesn't it?!

Last October, I started the applique process, stitching chick bodies and wings cut from felled wool onto the wool background fabric. Seven months later, 16 chicks, embroidered with threads and beads, run free! Please click the picture to enlarge it, so you can enjoy the fanciful details.

If you are new to this process, you can see the various steps and pictures of the chicks on these posts. Of course, they are inspired by Sue Spargo's exhibit at the La Conner Quilt Museum, by her book, Creative Stitching, and by taking a one-day class from her to get me going. Along the way, other books, embroideries, and drawings also inspired me.

As you might guess, most of the chicks have at least a few beads. Here is one with the main motif embroidered with beads.

And, here is one with just a few beads, the center of the "flowers," and one with no beads at all.

Also note that I've quilted the piece with Danish Flower Thread in a shade which closely matches the background color.

At first, I thought it would be pleasing to embellish the areas between the chicks with flowers, vines, and leaves using three close shades of the background color. Here is an example.

It looks OK when you look at just four chicks with the flower/vine motif in the center. But when I had finished 6 of the areas (sorry no photo), some of them with larger spaces and larger vines/leaves, it looked too busy. It took away from the chicks. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to look at the chicks or the flowers. So I picked out the vines and leaves, leaving just the flowers, which weren't such a distraction.

After sewing on the binding, the chicks seemed to need a little warming around them. So I added a line of stem stitch in variegated pearl-cotton in a magenta color. It pleases me!

Oh, and one more thing... This is a quilt, designed to hang on the wall, with lots of details to enjoy as you view it up close. But what happens to wool felt when it is out in the open? MOTH DAMAGE and DUST are the enemies. My solution? Find, buy, or have somebody make a wall-mounted display case, with a hinged door. Hang the quilt inside the case, which remains closed except when somebody wants to take a closer look. The above, found on the internet, is close to what I have in mind, with a white background of course.

What's next in chick-land? Well, my dear niece just got married... Here is the start of her wedding gift... I'll post a finished photo soon.

Exhibition of my Beadwork!

Bringing my beadwork to the Museum

Many, many moons ago, when I first started beading, I made an important decision about my future beading career. I decided not to be in the business of selling my beadwork. That’s a huge and somewhat uncommon decision for an artist, because most feel that in order to justify the time it takes to do beadwork and the cost of materials, it has to be sold. Many also take sales of their work as a marker of their skill as an artist… “if it sells, then I am an artist; if I sell lots of it, then I am a successful artist; if a gallery takes my work, then my work is good,” etc.

Demonstration prior to the Opening on April 1st.

My dear friend, Liz, drove to La Conner for the opening!

Those are tempting thoughts, aren’t they?! However, I had previously been a metalsmith, making one-of-a-kind silver and gold jewelry for 5 years. During those years, I experimented with various methods of selling my jewelry – craft fairs, home shows, commissions, galleries – and found that I hated all of them. Marketing my work, talking about it, looking in people’s eyes as they walked by my booth without stopping, answering questions about how I made something, knowing the person asking was also a metalsmith and might copy my ideas – all of that was like a millstone around my neck, depressing, daunting, and no fun at all.

So, when beadlust jumped in my heart, I almost immediately decided I would not sell my work. Instead, I would make my living by selling beads and beading supplies, teaching others how to bead, and writing books about beading. It’s been a great pathway for me, almost always fun, challenging, exciting – and, it has paid my bills and given me the means for many beady adventures. To be sure, I have sold some of my beadwork, especially jewelry, here and there. But it’s always when opportunity comes to me, not when I’ve struggled to be accepted for a show.

Twenty-seven years later, I am looking back down my beaded pathway with great satisfaction, pleased as punch about my initial decision. Twenty-seven years later, I also own a substantial stash of beaded objects that I’ve made over the years – beaded jewelry, bags, books, dolls, wall art, sculptures, and quilts. While many of them decorate my studio and home, some live in boxes, stored away in cabinets. I feel a bit guilty about those poor babies. Shouldn’t I get them out, brush the dust off, and sell them? Oh yeah, I forgot, I hate selling/promoting my beadwork.

All of the above is to introduce a fabulous and unexpected opportunity that came my way recently… The curator of the La Conner Quilt & TextileMuseum contacted me to ask if I would be willing to exhibit my beaded quilts and other beadwork in a one person show at the museum for the month of April, 2015. WOW! Would I be interested? You bet I would!!!!

Twenty-eight pieces! Once I cleared the pieces for the show out of my studio, the nearly empty walls and display counter was depressing. Guess what happened?  I opened up those boxes, and brought out things I hadn’t ever displayed, or at least hadn’t displayed for a long time. What great fun to see them every day this past month! I love it!

Two days ago the show closed (waaa), and my work is back home again. Here it is, all piled up on my studio tables. Nice to have it home; not so nice to decide which pieces go back into boxes.

Exhibition closed - beadwork back home again

And then there is the question of what is to become of it in the long run. I am 72 years old. It might be time to start thinking about that. Some will go to my beady friends, and some to my nieces and nephews (if they want it). And, I’d die happy if I knew that some of the best pieces were in the permanent collection of a museum or two. Rosie, The Uncaged Hen, for example should be in a museum, don’t you think?

Rosie, The Uncaged Hen

Having the show in La Conner, seeing my work so beautifully displayed there, gives me the energy to start thinking about the future of my beadwork, to make a list of my all the pieces, place an "insurance value" on them, and start talking to acquisition curators about it. Although the idea of this task seems a little like “selling my work,” the show in La Conner makes it worth the effort.

La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum

Exhibition of My Beadwork... April 1 - May 3!!!

Beadlust 

an exhibition of bead and fiber works by Robin Atkins

This is the first solo exhibition of my work! I am very pleased and honored that the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum offered me a show in their new Local Artist Exhibit Program's first-floor Landmarks Gallery.

There are 28 pieces in the exhibition, including beaded quilts, books, dolls, and framed art. Several of the pieces are new and have not been exhibited previously. Below is one of them, a beaded and embroidered collage using some of my hand-dyed, re-purposed fabrics.

Every Child Should Have Her Own Tree, hand-dyed, beaded, embroidered fabric collage

I hope some of you will be able to come see my work, as well as the work of the other two featured quilt artists in the upper floor galleries.

Exhibition Information:

• Where: La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum, 703 2nd Street, La Conner, WA 
• When: April 1 - May 3, 2015. Museum hours are 11-5 Wednesday through Sunday (closed Mon. & Tues.)
• Contact Museum: 360-466-4288; web www.laconnerquilts.org 
• Info about the exhibit: http://www.laconnerquilts.org/beadlust---robin-atkins.html 
• Other exhibits: The work of Denise Miller and Nancy Ryan is on the 2nd & 3rd floor of the museum; Robin’s work is on the 1st floor 

Exhibition Events: 

• Opening reception at the museum: April 1, 4 to 7 pm; all three artists will be there; free admission
• Demonstration at the museum: Robin demonstrates process and techniques of bead embroidery, April 1, 2-4 pmWorkshop: 
• Robin teaches Improvisational Bead Embroidery, May 2-3 in La Conner http://www.laconnerquilts.org/improvisational-bead-embroidery.html

A couple of readers have contacted me asking if the above work, or any of the other pieces will be for sale...  Nope, afraid not... exhibition only, although the museum's excellent gift shop does carry my books.

Huge Challenge: Making a Whole from the Parts

In the previous posts, you've seen the individual blocks I've been making, 61 of them, for my Travel Diary 2014 quilt. Each block is quilted, bound, and embellished... each a mini-quilt. The difficult challenge was how to put them all together into a whole piece.

This is one of the 61 blocks.

My original thought was to stitch them together into a wall hanging, something like the arrangement below:

No way! As I played with the arrangement, it was obvious that the results were "muddy," confusing, and "busy" from close up... and boring from a distance.

So then, I spaced them apart, like in a photo album, not touching, something like this:

Nope. That didn't work either... still too busy, muddy, and boring from a distance. Akkk, what to do???? Sleep on it!

Next morning, the solution came to me upon waking! Sew them together in clusters, and mount the clusters on a back-quilt!

To see how the idea would work, I grouped the blocks on a piece of fabric from my stash, each cluster representing a whole (or segment of a) trip. This is how it looked:

The idea of clustering worked! Yay! Instead of 61 different things to view, there were now only a dozen or so. And from a distance, the shapes of the clusters against the pathway of background color made an interesting pattern.

What color would the back-quilt be, and how would the clusters be attached, I wondered? After stitching the clusters together, I took them to the quilt shops in Anacortes to find the a fabric for the back-quilt.  It had to be a read-as-solid print, one that wouldn't distract from the clusters, in a color  that contrasted in value with the over-all value of the clusters. I soon found that either too much or too little value contrast was not good. Two green prints and a light coral print came home with me as possibilities.

That evening, after trying all three of them, I decided to go with one of the green prints. The clusters seemed to "pop" nicely on it!

However, the next morning, when I viewed it in daylight, the green seemed just too cool. My travels were warm (at heart) and wonderful...  I wanted the quilt to have visual warmth. Back to the drawing board. I made a "help!" call to Lunnette, my quilting friend and travel companion on one of the trips, who came over and agreed that the green was good... except for the important consideration of "warmth." While trying various possible fabrics, she happened to mention that red is sometimes considered a neutral color, which made me look at the red/rose fabrics in my stash with a different eye. When we put the clusters on a piece of medium-rose batik, we both knew instantly we had found the back-quilt fabric!!! Whooo-hooo!

Next was the matter of how to construct the back-quilt and how to attach the clusters. I made all the mini-decisions on an "as needed" basis. Here they are in order:

1. quilt the names of the people I spent time with on these travels on the back-quilt (picture shows one quilted line, and two lines written in chalk to be quilted)
   
   
2. use the same color thread as the fabric to quilt the names, so they are there, but do not distract the viewer from the clusters of blocks
3. make the edges of the back-quilt irregular
4. bind the back-quilt edges, and then whip stitch the binding with pearl cotton, the same as the individual blocks
   
5. sew the clusters onto the back-quilt on the top edge only, allowing the cluster to be lifted to see the backs of the blocks (all different fabrics, carefully chosen for the subject of each block), and giving a place to sew a label identifying the location, people, etc. in the photos of that cluster
6. use a double row of hand-stitching along the top of each cluster to support the weight
7. make a small identifying label for each cluster
   
8. sew a small, and very personal, embellishment on the back of each cluster, something I know is there but that most people won't see (or know the meaning of if they did see it)

And here is the finished quilt. It's 37" wide by 43" tall. Even if you click-to-enlarge, this picture does not do the quilt justice... So, if you'd like to really SEE it, come to the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum during April (April 1 - May 3), when it and 29 other of my beaded objects and quilts will be exhibited!

What did I learned making this quilt? Whew... probably more than you'd want to read... The most important thing was a reinforcement of the "just do it" approach to original art, an approach that works so well for me with my bead embroidery. Not stressing over all the decisions, not needing to have all the answers in hand before starting, is a hugely enabling gift to the creative process!

Finished Making 61 Quilt Blocks!

For 23 days straight I've been making, quilting, and embellishing blocks for my 2014 Travel Diary quilt. Today I finally finished all 61 of them!!! Here's the stack:

The next, and quite challenging, job is to figure out how to put them together to make a wall quilt. I'll write another post about that process later. For now, it will be fun just to show you a few more of the individual blocks. You can scroll back a few posts to see some of the others, and the inspiration for this quilt.

This one is a beautiful slab of rock with the route of the Dinkel River in eastern Holland carved on it. The dots are small towns, including Oldenzaal, where my friend, Lies Koster lives.

I've just ridden Lies' electric bicycle (a Swiss Flyer) 15 miles to the Bentheim Castle, across the Dutch border in Germany. I love that bike... most comfortable and still a decent workout, even with the electric assist. I want one!

Oh goodness, a giant chick visited the Emtinghousen windmill in Germany while I was there with Sabine Keichel!!!! Do you think we screamed and ran away or shared our lunch sandwiches with it?

Jan Knol, partner with Lies Koster, is demonstrating the Christmas and wintertime tradition of horn blowing in the Netherlands.

This is Jan's house and yard. A bird-lover, vegetable and flower gardener, Jan's runs a bed and breakfast place in his home in Denekamp, eastern Holland, where I stayed for a week. Lovely place, great breakfasts, happy memories!!!

In Germany, I spent an afternoon walking around the grounds of Kloster Wienhausen, a serene and beautiful abbey, a secluded and safe place where widowed women, women who need a home, women of the church, can go to live.

I've had this old pendant or charm for such a long time, I don't remember where I got it. It's the perfect embellishment for the abbey block, simple yet elegant.

My friend, Joska, in Sunderborg, Denmark has built a grape arbor in his backyard, with several varieties of grapes growing in large, healthy clusters. Although the bees had found the grapes, we managed to pick as many as we could eat.

 

The museums in Budapest are all housed in magnificent, old buildings, well maintained, striking examples of architecture. This is a bit of the mosaic floor in the entrance to the Museum of Applied Arts. I embellished the photo with a wool felt heart embroidered with a bouquet of roses because I love being in Budapest.

The above blocks are are pictures from my trip to Europe last October. Now we'll travel backward in time to June, when I took a month-long road trip, stopping at various national and state parks, attending my 50th college reunion, and visiting family in MN.

My brother, Matt, and his wife, Karen, are super flower gardeners! One of my favorite times in MN was sitting on their back yard deck, with Benny, the cat, on my lap, my mind calmed and refreshed by the lovely flowers and birds in the yard. These iris bloomed while I was there!

Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis was in full flow in June, with enough water pouring down its 53-foot drop to raise a continuous, gigantic splash as it hit the pool at the bottom.

Heading westward again, I stopped at St. John's University, where I found this lovely surprise, a towering sculpture made of woven willow and ironwood branches, five "huts" all leaning on each other. The artist, Patrick Dougherty, named it Lean On Me. Here's a really cool youtube video showing how it was made.

A week in Yellowstone National Park was just not long enough to take in all the beautiful wildflowers, the animals, and the rock formations. This June I'm headed back there again for more!

Entering Glacier National Park on Hwy. 2 from the East, one has a panoramic view of the formerly glacier-covered peaks behind rolling plains where once bison roamed freely. Stopping along the highway to take this photo, I felt the presence of wild buffalo. Remembering that feeling, I tried to find a way to convey the experience on this block.

Guess that's enough blocks for this post. You can see more of them by scrolling through the previous 3 posts. In the next post, I'll cover the process of assembling these blocks, ranging in size from half of a playing card to larger than a greeting card. As I look at the stack of finished blocks, it feels like a daunting challenge to figure out how to put them together in a way that will look good as a whole. Wish me luck!