Author: Sue Lewis textiles

My art quilt sold.  It has been traveling in New Mexico and I was notified that my quilt was sold.  It’s traveling days are over!

My grandfather wrote the following words about dreams:

“May we have dreams in abundance

Dreams old and new of sweet, vague half-forgotten

memories running backward like milestones along the

road of time.

Dreams of golden promises and supreme triumphs lying

just around the corner.

May the curtain never go down on the quaint

old-fashioned play of fancy until the lights fade out.

Dreams are the vanguard of human progress. They go

before and the world follows.”

John Randolph Stidman

Spent the day visiting the Lincoln Art Center in Fort Collins.  It has a wonderful art quilt exhibit on display currently.  Some very unusual quilts there. Some were displayed on the wall with plexiglass covering them, some 3-dimensional and a couple that we could not figure out how it was made.  Very intresting and lots of wonderful color combinations!  Eye candy and food for thought.  Had lunch at Lucille’s with Carol Eaton.

I have finished quilting “Tracings” , as you can see below:

I have also added painted branches as embellishment.  This was easy to quilt because I just traced all the organic marks left on the fabric by eco dyeing, monoprinting, painting and sun printing.

I have now added a piece of found rust to the branches to update this one a bit.

This shows painted, eco dyed, discharged and sun printed fabric and some hand stitching on a new quilt called “Tracings”.  I quilted it by tracing all the marking made by the paint, salt and leaves applied to the fabric.  Sorry, I did not get a photo yet of the quilting.

In the middle is a Gelli print on black fabric with metallic paint. The pale oval shapes are sun printed money plant disks, which produced a very sharp image.

Here is “Aspen Shadows” in progress.  I need to quilt it and bind it up to finish this one.  Still deciding how to quilt.  I have used flour resist for the packground on canvas, added the aspen trees and further defined the black squiggles with a marker.  I added the black border fabric and used oil paint stix to do the aspen trees on the sides.  Somehow I deleted the full photo when uploading them from my phone, but here is a detail shot.

This is called “Beyond Measures”.  It has an old pattern, a ruler and a measuring tape on it.

Trying out some mixed media ideas. Yes, I found a fork in the road and turned it into a fork in a tree! It is titled “Found: Sustenance”.  The tree is made out of melted Tyvek.

In taking a workshop with Wen Redmond, I had time to make some samples of various techniques, using printed photos.  We printed on different substrates like cotton, canvas, silk, tissue paper, stabilizer and even foil lined tea bag wrappers.  If you are using non-porous surfaces, you need to apply InkAid (digital grounds) to it and let it dry.  We also used molding paste or modeling paste on stabilizer and stamped into it to add texture.  So much fun!  My printer was not working quite right, so I skipped on to creating collages using the small printed samples I got.

The one above had black lava and ceiling glitter added to it.  We printed on organza, linen, Joss paper and cheesecloth.  Loved every minute.  Wen Redmond is fearless and over the top creative!

My quilt called “Ripples on the Rio Grande” is appearing in the book called “Life Along the Rio Grande”.  It is now available at Amazon!  There are 34 other artists with quilts accepted into the exhibit which will travel in New Mexico, Colorado and in Wyoming.

Here is a detail shot of “Shadow Seekers” which shows my sun printed canvas created on August 21, 2017.  That’s right, on the solar eclipse day! I wanted to do something creative on that day.  It was dusk to dawn in 4 hours.

This next one inspired a haiku:  “Becoming moonlight, soft as a whisper landing, echoing silence”:

I’ve been having fun with my new cutting machine!  I can design my own stencils and then use paint or paint sticks to add them to fabric and away I go on my next quilt!  Above image shows some indigo dyeing done 2 years ago.  Finally getting to use it.