Baby Isabelle Jackson's New Quilt

At the end of 2023, a new baby girl was welcomed to the extended family:  Baby Isabelle Jackson, daughter of my niece Rachel and her husband Court.  Happily, this gave me an excuse to create an original crib quilt measuring 49" wide by 53" high.  Some history:  In 2015, I went to India with two friends on a quest to discover fabric artists in the state of Gujarat.  Along the way we discovered the Rann of Kutch's wildlife santuary and stayed briefly at the Rann Riders Resort.  On a mini safari we saw many exotic (to me) birds including Painted Storks, a Snake Eagle, black-headed Ibis, Egrets and Greater Flamingos among others. I drew many of the birds once we got back from our trip, and created the bird fabric printed on the quilt back above.  Unfortunately I had only taken a little Canon Powershot G15 camera, which was not good enough for great bird photos. The beauty of applique is that I could use my photos as reference to create the stork image on the quilt front.  This was done by making an Adobe Illustrator image, which was then used as a template for the final fabric applique design.  Many of the quilt fabrics were purchased from Britex in San Francisco with a mix of soft whites, pastel pinks, cotton satins and more. The basic design was created with Electric Quilt's EQ8 software, then modified by accident, or intent, as the quilt was being built.   The memory of the trip, bird motif, and the quality of the different fabrics made working on the quilt another level of pleasure.

Quilting During Covid - helps me keep my Sanity

Top to Bottom

1.  Latest, finished in August, using all silk scraps with some added collage silk birds:  "Silk Scraps Birds" quilt front 48 1/2" W x 68" H

2.  Silk back of "Silk Scraps Birds" quilt

3.  Quilted face masks using original designed fabrics and original art bird applique

4.  Quilt finished at the beginning of the Stay at Home Covid experience in March:  "Two Birds" with wool punch birds and original design Running Artist Model fabric.  45" w x 62 3/4" H

All done in time to cozy up in winter.  Looking forward to cooler weather since it is 106 degrees F right now.  Crazy year, between Covid, fire, heat and rancid politics.  

Shelter in Place brings out the Pioneer in me

Sheltering in place brings out my family's genetic pioneer background: cooking, sewing and managing to survive (so far) independently while enjoying the finer things in life (good food and art).

Latest placements make food taste even better!

Top:  New 3 original "Six Squares" placemats + a photo of the backing.  Squares fabric left over from a quilt in process.  These are 20 x 13 with cotton batting and insulation

Bottom:  Smaller, older placemats (front and back) done on commission. 

Bio Blanket

Since I'm now working on a new quilt, I thought I'd post the last one I finished this past January, after it got delayed a year due to illness.  Above Bio Blanket finished in 2020, based on Frank Miller comic art and biography photos taken by my father, E.A. Autrey, as featured in the Growing Up Autrey book, published with Blurb.  This only goes up to high school.  A great deal happened after that!

California Sunshine Quilt

Finally finished my mega quilt!  80 individual photographs printed on fabric and woven into the quilt using an original plaid design.  Photos of my artist wooden models were used as templates for the four characters, which were then appliqued onto silk swatches using some cool Martha Negley designed fabric.  They looked a bit naked, even after adding the birds, so I later added bathing suits with a fabric I designed and printed.  The quilt is so big (74 1/4" h x 66 3/4" w) I had to do it in three sections then sew the sections together at the end.  What's going on in this quilt, you ask?  Well, I love California, I love the sun, I love taking photos in my neighborhood on sunny days, and I love birds. 

Magnolias

Latest quilted wall hanging tells the story of white and pink magnolia flowers going from bud to bloom.  Center is a patchwork of photos printed on silk surrounded by raw edge applique of various cotton and silk fabrics showing a portion of a Magnolia flower's life cycle.  It's amazing how much time these things take!  But creating art works wonders in taking the mind off the horrors of our current government. 

"Sewing Tools Used and New" - a Recently Finished New Art Quilt

This quilt happened for a couple of reasons: 
1.  I started collecting old scissors on a trip to Indiana in 2013, after enviously noting my artist aunt Reva's scissor collection.  This forced me to take a class on flash photography, and buy a flash attachment for my camera, in order to accurately photograph my old scissors.  That done, the scissors were photoshopped into a polka dot star pattern I designed.
2.  On a trip to the Galapagos in 2017, a fellow traveler was always sewing and I spent a couple of hours doing a watercolor of her pin cushion, which I liked a lot.  So I printed it onto fabric.
3.  I made the mistake of going into Britex Fabrics in SF (before they moved this year), thinking I would only look, and exited with scissor and pin cushion fabrics plus some complimentary blue and white fabric as well.  I needed to do something with them.
Once all of the above happened, I thought I'd put all the elements together and make a quilt I could enter into a cool quilt contest.  The problem is my craft abilities are inferior to my creative abilities so the finished quilt, being slightly imperfect, would probably never get accepted in a craft quilt contest.  Additionally, after photographing the quilt, I transformed it in Photoshop to neatly fill a unified space and find it now looks slightly more warped than it really is.  So the only place this quilt will be featured for now is here.  It will be live for viewing at my Marin Open Studios this coming May, however.

Pink Diamond Owl Trees

My first wall hanging quilt! 

Some New Fabric and Paper Art

Top to Bottom:
Paper Art Collage:
"Flamingos and Yellow Roses" Paper Collage 22" w x 19 1/2" h

Fabric Art Quilts:  (photos could show the final work better)
Wild Animal Baby Quilt 49" w x 49 1/2" h
Wild Animal Baby Quilt back with various Minky fabric patches
"Under the Sea" 48 1/2" w x 71 1/2" h (includes batik fabrics bought in India, photos and various other applique art)
"Robin Walking Away From Chaos" 47" w x 68" h.  Tons of hand embroidery and a wool punch bird!

Revisiting an Old quilt

Trying to put my quilts together in one place on my Pinterest page LINK HERE, I found a few that were saved from an old defunct website (redcrowartworks) I closed out years ago.  So, I'm reposting one of my first little quilts titled "Bee World," created in 2014, so the link will be more viable.  The quilt was mainly comprised of a collection of my art printed on fabric, some original fabric designs and a centerpiece of beautiful french silk I bought off of eBay, in a mix of silk fabric remnants, and which had some beautiful little embroidered bees on it.  My sewing skills are not the best, as one can see from the irregularity of the piece.  One of the artworks, a digital rendering of an oil painting of sunflowers, has recently reincarnated itself into a paper collage.

Variations on a Bear Theme

Digital bears (from a pen & ink & watercolor original) on the left; Quilted bears on the right.  The polka dotted bear is my latest - created for a new creature quilt.  Can't get enough of this bear!

A Story of Three Quilts

Quilting takes a looooong time, at least for me.  Here is the story of these three new quilts:

Top #1:  Florida Spoonbill, 85 1/2" long x 80" wide.  I started this quilt a year ago and only finished it last month.  Then it was too big for me to photograph, so I took it to the exceptional Jay Daniel at Black Cat Studio (link here), which took a bit more time.   The quilt was put together in 9 pieces to accommodate my small Bernina sewing machine, and is intended to represent the elusive spoonbill in a Florida swamp, with the blue sky above.  I stopped planning as much as I had with my earlier quilting efforts and cut and sewed most of this quilt without doing too much measuring.  I also learned to cut and sew curves.  I went to Florida in 2014, to Singer Island, looking for a Spoonbill, but never found one in the flesh so had to create my own.  The brown & blue batik fabric in the quilt was brought back from India, where I had the good fortune to buy it directly from the Mundra artist, Shakil Khatri, who designed it.  This was the 3rd quilt I made with his beautiful fabrics. Unfortunately, I sold the 1st one before getting it photographed.

Middle #2:  Amber's Marathon Quilt, 85 1/2" long x 72 1/2" wide.  This quilt contains only about 1/3 of all the winning T shirts won by my marathon running daughter.  Sewing stretchy jersey was a pain, as was the dot minky fabric backing.  To personalize the piece, I took photos on various trip to Seattle of Amber's awards and sewed those fabric photos into the quilt, along with various drawings I did of running shoes.  It came out a bit lopsided, so you can tell it is hand made!

Bottom #3:  Albion Bird in Window, 30 1/2 x 30 1/2.  Now that I'm taking a lot of photographs, my desire is to do something practical with them, such as printing them on fabric and sewing them into quilts.  This is one such example, having taking various photos of the windows in a shed in Albion.  I combined the photos then added an applique and embroidered bird before quilting the entire piece.  This is a new wall hanging format, rather than my traditional 'lounge on the couch' size.

Freehand Drawings of Various Well Worn Running Shoes

to be printed on fabric and sewn into daughter's in-process marathon race-running quilt, composed primarily of Ts won at a multitude of races.  In fact, there are too many race Ts for one quilt, so I'm having to be selective, but I also want to personalize it, hence the Asics,  Newtons and Nike's above.

India Polka Dot Batik Quilt

Latest quilt, my largest yet!  Queen size, with DreamWool brand merino wool batting, and hand tied with red cotton embroidery thread (also from India). I fell in love with the polka dot material on a fiber arts tour of India in January, 2015.  Visiting batik artist Shakil Ahmed Q. Khatri, near the area of Mundra-Kutch, in the state of Gujarat, was a surprise treat. He had so many beautiful batiks, I wanted to buy them all.  One pink/red batik fabric, quilted with pink silk/satin, has already gotten away, sold to jeweler/friend Gemma Rose at cost, without my photographing it first.  This polka dot design was unusual. It was hanging outside the artist's house, drying, when I spotted it.  It took awhile to find another batik (the turtle fabric backing) to match sufficiently.  The polka dot fabric was so beautiful on its own, I didn't want to cut it up to much, so merely cut what I had in half, sewed that together and (after months of work) voila.

More info on the artist can be found here:  http://www.kala-raksha-vidhyalaya.org/2009/men/eportfolios_shakil_ahmed_kasambhai_khatri.php

Spoonbill Applique

Rough, not yet quilted, block for a new Spoonbill Windows of India quilt I'm working on.  I love working with raw applique (ie the fabric edges are not turned under first.)  The lazy person's way to sew!

Funky Bird T's: To Star or Not to Star

Funky Bird Ts in Process:  Continuing my exploration of washable fabric bird applique on T shirts, I'm thinking the birds are better without the star device as it tends to drown them out.  I am going to skip the iron on art transfers also, as they never work very well (iron marks always show.)  Onward!

Crafty Weekend

Top Three:   Simple Ecology brand organic cotton canvas grocery bags with original art quilted panels: Black Bird in Marin, Parrot with Baobab Trees and Tokay Gecko
Bottom Two:  Two new T shirt applique designs (not yet embroidered):  Blue Jay and Crow

Antique India Quilt With Birds and Roses

New Wall Hanging Quilt front and back.  Centered antique hand sewn satin/cotton quilt from India with four of my hand drawn Indian birds (seen in India in January of this year) printed on cotton (painted stork, flamingo, two ibis).  Cotton, satin, glitter trim, couched rat tail and some hand embroidery. Rose pattern cotton back and rosebud cotton binding (both designed by Martha Negley for Rowan. Westminster Fibers).  Measures 28 1/2" wide x 43 3/4" high.

Lionfish Ts

Experimenting with fabric and embroidery applique on T shirts to maybe set up a shop for custom Ts. These four designs incorporate 100% cotton lion batik fabric, brought back from India, with other cotton fabrics and two colors (yellow/green and red) embroidery threads.  Which do you prefer?