For the first time a GoFundMe campaign has been launched.
From the site:
The Quilts of Valor® Foundation’s mission is to cover service members and veterans touched by war with comforting and healing Quilts of Valor. In 2016, over 19,000 Quilts of Valor were awarded stateside, from sea to shining sea, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. A Quilt of Valor is made totally by volunteers who give of their time and resources to make the highest quality quilt they can. The estimated cost is $250 per quilt, which includes fabric for the top, batting (filler), backing fabric, and shipping. We ask for your financial help to enable more quilts to be made and awarded. All funds collected will be provided to individual groups of quilters around the country to further the mission of Quilts of Valor Foundation. Please donate today and help us honor a veteran with a comforting and healing Quilt of Valor. As of January 15, 2017, QOVF has recorded the awarding of over 151,000 Quilts of Valor.
To learn more about the program, here is a clip from the 73-minute documentatry, Quilts of Valor, featruing Eleanor Burns, Alex, and Mark Lipinkski. The program, hosted by Marianne Fons, was originally aired on PBS a few years back.
To learn more about the Quilts of Valor program, click here.
Creating maximum effect using line does not have to be complicated. This week, Deborah Boschert shares how she uses the elements of line to captivate by examining two of her quilts in depth. Through the use of subtle, but effective lines, she shows how she holds the viewers attention while being guided along the journey around the quilt.
Line by Deborah Boschert
When designing a quilt, all the elements are carefully chosen to work together to create the over all visual impact. Line is one of the elements that can be a part of the design. A line can define a shape, suggest movement, add texture or fill a space. It can be thick or thin, straight or curvy, controlled or random. It can be created with fabric, stitching, or surface design.
It’s helpful to embrace these different ways to describe and understand line. Then when you are designing a quilt, you can think clearly about the different ways line can be used to maximum effect.
Green Bowl Gathering Small Multitudes
In quilting, a line can be created in so many ways! Let’s look at some examples. In Small Multitudes and Green Bowl Gathering, we can deconstruct the art quilts and pick out different ways I’ve used line.
In both, I’ve outlined the bowls using strips of fabric fused over the bowl shapes. I chose to make the lines relatively chunky and irregular. These lines remind me of thick magic marker sketches. Imagine how different it would look if I’d placed the outline precisely along the edge of the bowl shapes with no breaks or overlapping.
Detail Small Multitudes by Deborah Boschert
Both art quilts also have arched lines at the top. In Small Multitudes, the line is hand-stitched in yellow. In fact, each stitch is a tiny line and they work together to visually create the arched line. Additional arches are machine stitched in black thread. Those are much thinner, more subtle lines. In Green Bowl Gathering, I machine stitched similar lines in red. Making several lines of stitching over lapping each other and in slightly different shapes creates the overall effect of an arched line, but the multiple lines give it variety, movement and interest.
Maybe the most dramatic line in Green Bowl Gathering is the strong, horizontal strip that goes all the way from the left to the right. Everything else is built up around that line. (This horizontal line is made up of the shorter vertical lines of the striped fabric. Think about how different it would look if I’d used that same fabric with the stripes running horizontally.
There are several other small details incorporating lines in these two quilts. The tiny seed stitches that appear to fill the bowl are lines. The free motion quilted leafy shapes in the background are also lines.
The green circles in Green Bowl Gathering are printed with paint — some thick and blobbly, others thin and faint. When you consider the possibilities of each individual line, you can really take control of the design of a quilt.
As you’re designing your own original art quilt, zero in on the idea of how you can use lines to maximum effect. Will the lines be made from fabric? Or stitched with thread? Or created with paint, ink or dye? Think about how the design would change if a line were thinner or thicker. Are you most comfortable making controlled straight lines? What would happen if you tried something loose and gestural?
There’s no right or wrong way to think about all these details. But, giving them some close consideration may open up new possibilities in the creative process.
To learn more about Deborah Boschert, visit her website, follow her blog, or sign up for her enewsletter.
Looking for ways to use line when it comes to a traditional design? Let's look at Janet Stone'sRed Letter Daze. Janet (Show 1401) loves to take the viewer on a journey around, across and into her quilts. A huge fan of over the top details, see if you can spot how many ways Janet has included line in her 2012 NQA Masterpiece Award Winner.
Here are a few examples of Janet's masterful use of line:
Notice (left image) how the curved red lines flow along the edge of the outside border, while Flying Geese (and an occasional small block) take the eye journey around the central creamy field.
Notice (right image ) how the letters of the alphabet and the repeated curved lines flow around each of various block designs. The gentle curves of the letters and undulating lines help to soften the more angular Flying Geese and blocks in the center field.
Worksheet excercise: Using Line to Create the Illusion of Form
Adaptation of hand drawing exercise from Art is Every Day by Eileen S. Prince
Option 1:
Place your nondominant hand and bare forearm in a pleasing manner on a piece of white paper. Splay your fingers slightly, but keep your thumb as vertical as possilble. Using a pencil, lightly trace around your arm and hand. Place or draw another object, such as a heart, near your hand tracing. Trace this item lightly as well.
Using a dark marker, begin drawing a straight line (from the left side of the page) parallel to the lower edge. When you come to your pencil line, curve the line up slightly. Curve back down to the pencil line on the other side, and continue across the page. Repeat with each new line being about 1/4" above the previous. Try to keep your lines as straight and horizontal as possible. Repeat the process for the heart.
Option 2:
On a piece of plain fabric trace your hand and the heart in the same manner as Option 1. Make a quilt sandwich and machine quilt with a thread of your choosing using the same method of curving slightly when you reach a traced line.
Notice how in both options the curved lines make the hand and heart appear to be raised.
The hand is also drawing the eye towards the red heart.
Look what Diane Nelson wore to the LEGO Batman Movie premiere. Would you wear this for a night on the town? Could you adapt the "brick" idea into a quilt block idea?
The jacket was designed by renowned LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya and was inspired by the “Necessary Evil” sculpture from The Art of the Brick: DC Comics exhibit. It took Nathan more than 10,000 pieces, most of which are 2×2 plates, and over 100 hours to create.
Amy McClellan's Saturday Sampler program has quite a following. Learn how she manages to keep up with the over 600 people who want to play every month.
Art Quilter, Robbi Joy Eklow, shares her method for facing a quilt, a finish that gives the edges of a quilt a clean look without the frame of traditional quilt binding.
Robbi shares some of her quirky and colorful work, including a recent series of cog-and-wheel-based pieces. In addition, she shows how to use Adobe Illustrator, a sheet of fusible web, and an inkjet printer to create a ready-to-cut-and-use design, and demonstrates an absolutely ingenious method for squaring up large quilts.
International Quilting Weekend at TQS is a place to learn quilting. Now use this to make your creations come to life. The Grand Prize is a BERNINA 570 QE.
It's the right size with amazing features. It's time to finish your masterpiece.
Do you subscribe to more than one quilt magazine? Do you have fabric stored under every bed in the house? Do you think you are a fabri-holic? Take this test at Phoebe Moon Quilt Designs and find out.
We all know that quilting goes better with chocolate. This How It's Made video describes best how chocolate is made inside a Hershey candy factory in Pennsylvania in 1976. The factory tour shows chocolate bars and the famous chocolate Hershey’s Kiss being made on machines and mixers then shaped by production equipment into various chocolate shapes and designs. All happy kids know that the recipe for the best chocolate is typically made sweet, with ingredients of cocoa beans, roasted and ground, and then mixed with butter and sugar sometimes flavored with vanilla or nuts. Hershey's "Milk Chocolate" recipe was made to be less expensive than other traditional candies & chocolates which tended to be too expensive for the common American at the time.
Grab a cup of hot cocoa and watch the magic happen.
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