Pacific Piecemakers Quilt Guild

Bits and Pieces

November 2001, Volume 6 Issue 11

Claire McCarthy, Editor

Judith Jones Appliqué Workshop

Friday, November 16, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Gualala Arts Center

Long-awaited, once cancelled, much anticipated – it’s our own Judith Jones’ hand appliqué workshop. At this all day session, Judith will share her expertise with instruction, techniques, and tips that she has learned and developed over the years. If you haven’t seen Judith’s exquisite creations, you have a treat in store. If you know her work, you know she is simply one of the best.

If you’re signed up, you should already have a packet of material provided by Judith. Please check the materials list for items you will need to bring. If you aren’t signed up, check with Connie Seale at 785-3545 to see if there is space available. If not, don’t despair – you are invited to come and share the day with the workshop participants. Bring your own project and listen, observe, and benefit from Judith’s instruction as we all build our confidence in creating beautiful appliqué projects.

Our regular meeting will be held at 1:00 p.m., so even if you don’t participate in the workshop, come and join us for the monthly meeting! Show & Tell will be presented this month by the Thursday quilting group.

November Birthdays

3 —Anita Kaplan

4—Julie Verran

9—Margie Rosholt

18—Connie Seale

20—Ann Graf

25—Katie Horn

30—Saundra Brewer

30—Gayle Stewart

Membership

New Member—Susan Prukop,

785-9745, Box 83, TSR, 12/29,

bsprukop@yahoo.com

Email for Ellen Soule is

soule@mcn.org

Email for Betty Tresidder is

clifford@starstream.net

Mark Your Calendar

...before it gets too full! This year’s Holiday Luncheon will be on Friday, December 14, 12 Noon, at Gualala Arts.

In order to honor Gayle Stewart (who has given so much to the Guild, and who will be moving away from the coast soon), members who have taken any of her classes at Gualala Arts are asked to bring any items made in the classes to the Arts Center the day before the luncheon, so that they may be put on display as part of the decorations for the event.

Guild Glimmers

by Reva Basch

Lura Schwarz Smith has a warm personality and a wacky, self-deprecating sense of humor. Her slide show and lecture at our October guild meeting was billed as “the journey of an art quilter.” It has been quite a trip. As a teenager, she and her mom, blissfully ignorant of the finer points of quilting, sewed their own quilts using the “awful cotton-poly fabrics” popular at the time. Most were tied, she admitted, though they did quilt some, with big “toe-catcher” stitches.

Lura majored in art at S.F. State, with an emphasis on drawing and painting. She experimented with textiles for a senior painting class project, using applique and soft-sculpture. She considered it “painting with fabric.” She began creating three-dimensional wall hangings and soft sculpture which she sold through galleries, some to collectors such as the musician Kenny Loggins. One of her basic materials was pantyhose, which she stuffed, tucked, formed and painted to create rounded, often comic or ethereal faces and figures, sometimes freestanding, sometimes placed in an idyllic pastoral or fantasy setting. Her early wall sculptures, though lushly colored and rich in dreamlike imagery, strike her as stark, now, Lura said while showing us her slides -- all those bare, unquilted surfaces!

Speaking of slides, she used several of her earlier slides as examples of how not to photograph a quilt – the hands grasping the borders, holding it not-quite level, against a distracting background, in available, but inadequate, light. Offhandedly, Lura mentioned having met a National Geographic photographer in Alaska quite a few years back: “He had great equipment – camera equipment – so I married him.” Her later slides are, needless to say, of professional quality.

After moving to the Sierras, where she lives today, Lura joined a quilt guild for the first time, and discovered the wide world of quilting books, magazines, classes, shows and other resources and opportunities. Her experience as an illustrator and graphic artist, and her feel for the human figure, is evident in her more recent work, such as the multiple-prize-winning Seams a Lot Like Degas, which incorporates drawn, painted and photocopied elements as well as freeform art quilting methods and variations on traditional pieced blocks. Lura’s web site (www.lura-art.com) displays more examples of her work. Today, Lura is an established and world-recognized art quilter with her own unique style and toolbox of techniques.

Saturday’s “Designing Art Quilts” workshop was an effort to impart some of those techniques to a sold-out class of 20. Lura proved to be as engaging and personable a teacher as she is a speaker. She talked about the elements of design – composition, color, contrast, texture and scale. We learned the basics of tracing an image onto acetate, then projecting it, enlarged to the desired size, onto butcher paper to create a pattern. Most of the class time, however, was spent drawing and painting on muslin with fabric paints, oil pastels, and textile markers and pens. We may not all choose to incorporate such techniques into our own quiltmaking (there was considerable lively conversation -- both sotto voce during the workshop and, animatedly, outside -- about whether it “feels right” or “feels like cheating” to do so) but we had a swell time getting in touch with our inner artists. Look at Carol Tackett’s photos on our web site for proof. (www.pacificpiecemakers.org; scroll down to What’s New and click the obvious link).

Reminder: Bring your completed Hospice Hearts to the

November meeting. Diane Cunningham will be collecting them.

Art in the Redwoods, 2002

Please begin thinking about our annual fund-raising event, Art-in-the-Redwoods. We will need a Chairwoman to run this event for 2002. Linda Cotton has very good notes about what was done in 2001 and would be happy to meet with whomever has questions about the event.

Most of the work is done by all of our great volunteers who make the items for the booth. It is important to note, however, that if we do not get one or two people to agree to handle the event, it may not happen. So, please give it serious consideration.

The Nature of Things

Please make a note of the following important dates for next year’s Quilt Challenge, “The Nature of Things”:

March 21 - quilts are due

March 22 - quilts are hung

March 23 - opening reception

April 21 - quilts come down.

Call Annie Beckett, 785-2156, with questions.

News from E-land

Do you subscribe to the PPQG email list? If you do, you learned the dates for next year’s Challenge several days ago. You knew there was a last-minute opening in Lura Smith’s sold-out class. You might have responded to Anita’s request to make red, white and blue quilts for the children of World Trade Center victims. Well over half our members -- 58 people – are currently on the list. If you’re not, if you have an email account and a computer, and want to be sure you get timely notification on topics of interest to PPQG members, send me your current email address and I’ll sign you up.

When something new – like Carol Tackett’s fun photos of the October workshop – goes up on our web site, I immediately send email to the list. Instructions and patterns for the current Block of the Month are available at the web site, too. And if your copy of Bits & Pieces goes astray, or you need a back issue that you’ve discarded, remember that the current issue is usually up on the web site within a day or two of publication, and back issues are archived back to May 2001. I’m happy to report that the web site is apparently being well-utilized – it’s had nearly 600 visits so far, and I know they couldn’t all be from me!

Reva Basch, Webmistress