My first show

In November of 2019 I hung my first solo show at  Monroe Community Church in Grand Rapids.  Getting ready for this show has been a great experience: prepping work to hang, creating an artist statement, crafting a story, learning how to ruthlessly curate, pondering selling works, …

Here are a few glimpses for you.

Infrastructure series worked on the green-gray wall.
Advent dyed fabric piece paired with two hidden infrastructure pieces that highlight the lifecycles that we experience in our water systems. 
The large dyed fabric on the left was inspired by the Advent season, a time of hope.  Using symbols from my Flint water crisis series, I explored how a messy system can find renewal through a community effort, including university researchers, contractors, and government officials. Our call in Advent and every day is to be agents of hope, peace, joy, and love in our communities and the world. 
The 12″ pieces on the left are from my Flint series and were hung in pairs. 

Special thanks to Brent for his assistance in hanging the show.  Couldn’t have done it without him!

getting unstuck

Wondering why it has been over two years since I posted?  So am I!

I hit a creative roadblock that stalled my sewing for most of 2017 and even into 2018. Finally in September of 2018 I wrote down a list of quilts to finish with the goal of finishing by New Years Day 2019. (I will say that instagram also has changed my blogging habits … )

My scary list!

  • PIPE: 2 piece whole cloth
  • Big yellow quilt top
  • Large white quilt top with blue “cyclone”
  • PIPE: small, purples, white, khaki
  • PIPE: medium purples, white/khaki
  • PIPE: small, gray/blue, white/payne’s gray
  • PIPE: medium, circle with crosses
  • Infrastructure with binding tape
  • Infrastructure – gray green with pipes
  • Joe Cunningham Workshop Quilt?

After writing this list, I realized how many tops I had and that I was getting stuck on the quilting and I just needed to finish things!

Which, I began to do…

Pipes 1, Infrastructure 7 & 8, Cycle 1, September and October 2018

Then I got caught up in moving to a new house and a new studio… but once I unpacked I got back into the sewing…

Pipes 2, 11.4″x12.75″, early 2019
Pipes 2, closeup
Pipes 4, 10.5″x10.5″, early 2019
Pipes 3, 8″x9″, early 2019

Not quite by New Years, but progress is good!  Photographing in my new studio and house is proving to be challenging, so learning how to photograph quilts well is a work-in-progress!

Then came Lent, and a commitment to try some new things. This included trying resist dyeing on pieced quilt tops. The design board and the results…

Lenten Twelves 2, 12″x12″, April 2019
Lenten Twelves 1, 12″x12″, April 2019
Lenten Twelves 3, 12″x12″, April 2019
Lenten Twelves 5, 12″x12″, April 2019
Lenten Twelves 14, 12″x12″, April 2019

Then, on to the big quilts!

Worn, 21.5″x22.75″, May 2019
Closeup of Worn
“Worn” giving me inspiration in my studio!
Atonement, 12.5″x22″, Summer 2019
Cycle 2, 27″x39.5″, Summer 2019
Cycle 2 closeup

My scary list revisited in July of 2019…

  • FINISHED PIPE: 2 piece whole cloth
  • FINISHED Big yellow quilt top
  • FINISHED Large white quilt top with blue “cyclone”
  • FINISHED PIPE: small, purples, white, khaki
  • FINISHED PIPE: medium purples, white/khaki
  • FINISHED PIPE: small, gray/blue, white/payne’s gray
  • FINISHED PIPE: medium, circle with crosses
  • FINISHED Infrastructure with binding tape
  • FINISHED Infrastructure – gray green with pipes
  • Deferred indefinitely Joe Cunningham Workshop Quilt?
  • +FINISHED 5 Lenten Twelve Pipes that weren’t on my original list!
Also found time for sewing a baby blanket and samples for my daughter Kelsey of Lovely and Enough in the middle of these UFO’s.
What next?  Creative block still rears its head, but has mostly been sorted. So, I began to dive into a series on the Flint Water crisis that had been hanging around in my head for a long time and I just hung a show.  But, that is another story…
Thanks for reading and supporting my creative endeavors!
Blessings,
Jen

unfinished | finished

fifteens

Sometimes you get stuck. And sometimes, the unfinished project sits, and sits. I started a series of fifteens, 15″ square quilts, in 2015. I was trying to work in a series, but the composition of the different quilt tops felt very disjoint. Lovely colors, though! This fall as I sorted out my unfinished projects I found the top layouts. I decided to rearrange and finish the ones I could and put the rest of the fabric back in my stash. More than a year later, the second top was fun to finish and the free-motion quilting was simply delightful!

These were the quilt tops I was auditioning, but mostly gave up on or revised.
Free motion quilting was delightful to do! (for a change)

blessings for a marriage

The daughter of good friends of ours is getting married in March so I created a table runner and pot holders in keeping with her aesthetic, with a little design help from daughter Taylor. She graciously contributed ticking from her stash for these modern and fresh pieces. With projects like this, a little bit of love and a few prayers go into every stitch. Wishing Ally and Matt a lovely wedding and a good life together.

The potholders were fun to create from flying geese extras!

Lenten form 6

Expectations. The quilt top is on the design board. Your daughter says she likes this one best. It is calm and restful. And now you need to figure out how to quilt it without ruining that feel!

I’m finding that Ikea frames make an inexpensive and fun way to set off these quilts for displaying.

This was another one that required a seam ripper … the aqua under the circles was too edgy the first time and needed to be redone. Ended up a very similar color thread but with extended match-stick quilting and the grass-like quilting in the aqua. I love it now. The subtle changes in direction and addition of a slight purple color adds interest to the center of the circles. And, as always, the final tone-on-tone stitching that drew the circles out into the border adds the icing on the cake. Yeah!

Lenten form 5

Sometimes the final quilting is the hardest part. I enjoyed using multiple colors of quilting on the four. Then it was time to finish the circles … the variegated thread worked well, and looks good drifting into the rust. And yet, when I tried to finish the final circle I was creating in the rust it took two tries. The first time looked awkward. Enter the seam ripper. Second try was the charm.

“Infrastructure 5”

This quilt was inspired after I found a telephone pole buried in the woods. The pole had tall numbers on it that had been worn away. The rusty color echos the metal tags that were also nailed to the pole. The circles remind me of the phone wires coiled overhead. Reminders of a fragile crumbling and yet functioning infrastructure.

See all six Lenten Forms 2016 in the Lenten Forms 1-6 post.

Lenten form 4

Layers of interest … “Infrastructure 4” definitely has them.

From far away the color blocking is fairly stark, but get up close and personal and the red stitching around the discharged circles begins to pop and contrasts with the turquoise in the center. And the “drip” marks through the large area of drunken circles turn out to be colorful streams that echo the bold colors on the left. (Thanks to Kelsey @lovelyandenough for the drunken circles stamp that I used to print this fabric and Leslie Keating who organized the hand-printed fabric swap that inspired it.)

If you look closely, I straight-line stitched along the bottom of the drunken circles in a light turquoise … you almost never notice it, but it adds a nice little extra touch of life.

See all six Lenten Forms 2016 in the Lenten Forms 1-6 post

Lenten form 3

Infrastructure 3: Discharge + Define

This quilt top was made up of two different fabrics that I printed. The outer fabric was dyed rust and overprinted using a rubbing technique over strips of foam that had circles cut out of them. The inner fabric was dyed yellow, then a flour resist was applied, and I dyed it dark gray. I used a discharge medium that is heat activated to define the overall circle. Below you can see the first iteration … it took several to get the final result as I’m a novice at the discharge game!

pieced and in progress quilt tops on the design board; lower left quilt top with first discharge

the final discharge result & almost done quilting
and complete!

the discharged section and quilting up close and personal

The free-motion quilting was a challenge around the circle. In the end, by using fairly graphic colors that stayed with the discharge patterns I set up a nice flow around the circle. I embellished the outer edge a bit to draw the circle out, using a navy color thread in the lower left corner to contrast with brick red color I was sewing on.

Lots of energy and interesting color in this piece – Infrastructure 3. I see a contrast between pipes with unnoticed flow and a large conduit of rushing storm water or maybe even a storm pattern.

See all six Lenten Forms 2016 in the Lenten Forms 1-6 post.

Lenten forms 1-6

Sometimes the last 10% is the hardest part!  These quilts have been living on my design board, calling out for quilting for quite a few months. Finally, with a little extra time over the Christmas holidays I decided it was time to finish the last four of the quilts I started last February.

Yikes! The weather was bitter, but the photographs of the quilts sure pop.  I photographed on top of my compost bin because it was so cold out and I wasn’t enjoying venturing too far.

Lenten forms 2016

Here are my six Lenten Forms quilts. All the fabrics were hand dyed and printed with fiber reactive dyes. I experimented with resists, printing, and some discharge and overprinting of pieced quilt tops. The idea of infrastructure fascinates me… the invisible structures for water, gas, and electricity. We expect it to work all of the time, but sometimes the lines and flow are more chaotic than expected.

I have posted about the Lenten form 1 and Lenten form 2 previously, but here are all six in the series. Hopefully I’ll find a few moments to post a little bit more on each quilt with some close-ups, but for now I’ll enjoy (and I hope you do too) seeing the completed 16″ squares.

Infrastructure 1

Infrastructure 3

Infrastructure 6
Infrastructure 2

Infrastructure 5
Infrastructure 4

Lenten forms 2

First “finished,” but second Lenten forms quilt that I’m deciding is actually done. I finished the free-motion quilting some time ago on this quilt, but as I kept looking at it on the wall it seemed as if the quilting was taking away from the overall large composition, so I took out my seam ripper and got to work.

I used several manipulations of the fabric after initial printing for this quilt. The large yellow circle was discharged using a Dharma discharge paste (that they no longer carry) activated by heat (sunlight or iron). To get the aqua lines down the center of the quilt I used a flour resist dyeing technique on only the central portion of the quilt.

flour resist applied to quilt top
turquoise dye applied over flour resist

 This is the quilt with most of the free-motion stitching done. You can see the tree or root-like free motion stitching that goes all across the one end of the quilt. This was the part that bothered me, so I ended up removing all the roots that didn’t start inside the black fabric. I love the simpler quilting and am finally calli

extra stitching to remove: parallel lines and roots to the left

Here is the finished quilt, called “Infrastructure 2” nestled into my side garden alongside my driveway and with a few others in the series.

“Infrastructure 2”
Forms of Lent quilts

See all six Lenten Forms 2016 in the Lenten Forms 1-6 post.