Deacon's Stole

This stole has been created for a friend who will be ordained to the Diaconate in the Anglican Church this Sunday. The images on the stole are wheat and salt and have been created with free-motion thread painting . . . the wheat is stitched over two layers of organza and the long beard on the wheat is representative of durum wheat The dish of salt is stitched with a metallic thread and sharp angles on the stitches to represent the grains of salt.

The lower section of the stole, both front and back is pieced with a variety of white, ivory and gold fabrics and there are couched cords and hand embroidery accenting some of the pieces.

You can click on the images to zoom in for a closer look at the details.

More Spawning Salmon Art Quilts

It is now late September and fall is really in the air. The leaves on the trees are starting to change their colours and the air is decidedly cooler. The salmon are en route to their spawning grounds and already we are seeing the streams turn red from all the sockeye that are returning. It is so incredible to see how very red their body becomes and how the head is a true olive green. The best time to see them on the Adams River is October 2-24 when there is an abundance of salmon as well as lots of festivities celebrating the salmon. Roderick Haig Brown park, just across the Squilax bridge from the Trans Canada Highway is the place to go.

I couldn't stop at creating one spawning salmon art quilt this year so here are photos of two others.

This is a small art quilt (approximately 23 " x 11.5") with a background that is charcoal and black. The background is also hand stitched and beaded and the salmon has additional hand stitching. It has additional organza ripples and free motion machine stitching. This quilt is SOLD.


The next quilt is approximately 18" x 28" and it has been entirely free-motion machine quilted. It has been quilted quite densely and I am very pleased with the results. Be sure to click on the images to zoom in on the details . . .Many of the free motion designs used in this quilt were inspired by Leah Day (daystyledesigns.com) who has created and blogged over two hundred free motion designs that are posted on her website. What an incredibly talented person she is.

This art quilt won a Juror's Choice award at the Shuswap Lake Festival of the Arts in July 2011. SOLD

Spawning Salmon Art Quilt

2010 is the year of a big run of sockeye salmon that spawn in the Adams River, near our home. In October the river will be the scene of millions of these salmon that are returning to the river of their birth to lay their eggs. There is a salmon run every year . . . but every fourth year is a "dominant" run and this one is the biggest since 1913 with an estimate of 30 million sockeye spawning.

This art quilt has been made in honour of the salmon returning to the Adams River. The sockeye salmon becomes very red as it returns from the sea, the head becomes green and the shape changes. To see more about the salmon run click here.

This art quilt measures 19.5" x 27.5" and is constructed from synthetic crushed fabrics and dupioni silk that have a bit of sheen and iridescence that mimic the waters of the river and cottons that I have used to create the salmon and the rocks of the river bottom. The bright salmon eggs are laid in the gravel rock bed. This has been made using curved piecing as well as raw-edge applique to add some more texture to the water. There is hand embroidery and beading on the background as well as on the salmon and the tail-end of another salmon is ghost-stitched on the top left side.

If you click on the photo you will see more of the details of this piece.

UPDATED July 9, 2010: This art quilt has been awarded a "Juror's Choice" Award at the Shuswap Lake Festival of the Arts this week. This quilt is SOLD.

Horse Chestnut Leaf Art Quilt

This art quilt is made with hand painted fabric that I sun-printed with leaves and blossoms from my garden. I later used that fabric to produce a rubbing of a horse chestnut leaf from the beautiful tree outside my studio. If you are not familiar with horse chestnut trees, perhaps I should explain that their leaves are HUGE and the chestnuts that are produced must number in the tens of thousands on this one tree. So, you see, I have lots of reason to love and loathe the horse chestnuts :)

This art quilt showcases the rubbing of the horse chestnut leaf with machine quilting and hand stitching. The four small squares that hang below the leaf each have a chestnut stitched to them . . . from the prickly, spiny horse chestnut that is just opening to the remnant of the outer shell and the shiny chestnut within . . . the chestnuts at the upper loops have been drilled in order to hang like beads.

The edges of the quilt are finished with a handmade cord that I created and then couched to the outer edges. The same cord suspends the quilt from the wooden hanger which was purchased from Ten Thousand Villages.

This photo isn't the greatest (what else is new) but if you click on it, you can see the details more clearly.

Thanks for checking in to see my latest work.

Some of the purses that are in Calgary

I have left some of my purses and greeting cards, and even a few wall quilts on consignment in the Galleria in Calgary. Most of the purses I left have been in my Etsy shop on on this blog, but here are a few that had not been previously posted. My work has even posted on the Galleria's website which is a delight. Here's the link if you want to check it out www.calgarycraftedgifts.com. . . it is a wonderful place that carries a wide variety of high quality handmade stock and is now located on 9th Avenue SE in the Inglewood area of Calgary.

The black purse with the daisies stitched on it is a lovely soft linen and the daisies have beaded centres. I was having so much fun stitching the daisies that I re-created them on the aqua daisy purse that I posted yesterday.

The turquoise and brown bag is an Amy Butler fabric. It has lots of machine and hand quilting on it and is a really nice texture.

The third bag is one that I call Queen Anne's lace as that is the image I see in the variegated fabric. This is a MacKenna Ryan print that is subtle and distinctive at the same time. It is lined with a piece of my hand-painted fabric.

As always, these purses are my original design and are created by me in my smoke-free, pet-free, fragrance-free home studio :)

New purses for spring

After a busy week in Alberta I am back home and working on some new purses to re-build my inventory. It has been fun selecting some fabrics especially for spring and summer and then doing a bit of different embellishing.

You might recognize the fabric in the first purse . . . I have made several from this batik with the dark blue, tan and plum tones because it is so very versatile and I absolutely love it. Each of the purses I have made from it is a little different but they all can go from everyday wear to dressy casual with ease. I think this might have been the last piece so I'll have to find a new favourite. It has a lot of seed stitches on the back. . . The daisy purse doesn't show up too well in the photos but it has daisies hand-stitched on it with beaded centre . . . click on the photo to zoom in. . . The green purse has a luscious variegated green lining (the same fabric as I used for the base of the key fob) and blanket-stitched and beaded edging . . . there's lots of that on the purses I've created in the past couple of months. . . . the neutral batik print purse needs a new photo for sure as it is a beautiful restful fabric that will go from casual to dressy with ease.

I have made co-ordinating wristlet key fobs for some of the purses . . . I will wait and see if they are popular as an additional purchase or if they more frequently sell by themselves. I've just ordered more key fob hardware in a slightly smaller size so I'll try them out for the next few that I make.

Artist Trading Card - mounted for framing

This is one of my Artist Trading Cards that I have mounted on a buttery yellow parchment cardstock and matted in a dark green mat.

This ACEO (which means ‘Art Card Editions and Originals’) measure 2.5 x 3.5 inches and the card has a fabric backing which is signed and dated. It is mounted on archival double-sided tape so that it can be easily removed from the mat.

The ATC itself is a collage of green and black fabrics, fibres and threads and and some free motion stitching an hand beading. It has a thin metallic black cord couched around the outer edge. This can be framed in a plain black 8x10 frame or displayed on an easel, as in the photo.

Needle felted purse

Now here is a wonderful original purse . . . you won't find another walking down the street towards you!

There are a variety of fibres needle felted onto a base of cotton batting and muslin . . . fabrics are felted first and then yarns, roving, silk rods, silk fibres, tussah, mohair curls,and ribbons are felted on top . . . then some hand embroidery and beading have been added to embellish it some more. Click on the photo to see more detail.

The purse is lined with a piece of hand-painted cotton that has been textured with metallic paint . . . and the strap is hand spun yarn by a local fibre artist friend who used thin strips of recycled silk along with the other fibres to create this unusual yarn that is perfect for this bag.

It is all a veritable feast for the senses and will be a source of much discussion as a sample when I take it to show the needle felting class I am teaching soon.

Tree A

What an original title for this work "Tree A" . . . but I guess that is what it will be called until I come up with something more creative. This is a wall hanging that I worked on this past week and it has been an experiment in using techniques that I have worked with in the past incorporated into a quilt that came to be as a result of some serendipitous trees that appeared during the drying process of a piece of fabric that I painted. I wanted to bring the trees out by using this piece of the fabric in a landscape . . . but I wanted it to be a little less "realistic" than the last few landscapes I have done.

The result is this 17" x 23" art quilt. All the fabrics are hand-painted or hand-dyed by me and the foreground is constructed of cheesecloth, organza and other fibres that I needle felted by hand before applying it to the surface. There is even a bit of white cheesecloth "foam" around some of the rocks in the river.

You can click on the photo to see more of the detail. I'd be interested to know what you think.