It was at a museum that I first saw the moon jar. The color of the jar and the rustic line of the jar kept me in place for a long time. This inspiration has always been on the edge of my mind for a long time. This inspiration allows me to work at any time. Organza transfer dyed, Machine Pieced 36(H) 24(W)

I was so excited when Martha posed the Energy challenge. My stash is filled with vibrant colored fabric that I thought would be perfect for energy: fuchsia, yellow, brilliant orange. But then I thought that would be too easy: to let the fabrics communicate energy instead of the composition. I challenged myself to create energy with only black and white. What was I thinking? Actually, I've had the desire to create a black and white quilt like this for some time and this gave m

I chose a not very subtle solution to this challenge. Beginning with energies that have, and still do, support human development around the globe, ( supplied by fossil fuels and hydroelectric energy), I imagined a spot on earth that specializes in wind and solar energy, and ignored nuclear.

Fire and water are primordial sources of energy, and they have been crucial in the building of our civilization. As I said in my earlier blog post, fire was the first source of heat man learnt to control. And heat releases energy. When water is heated, steam is released and that’s another form of energy. Very appropriately, this quilt will be a tribute to my late husband. During his working life as an economist, his main subjects were housing (the fires of home), and water

Sometimes it's all just too much. There are so many things competing for my attention, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I can't absorb it all; I can only do one thing at a time. This quilt represents my brain, with all kinds of stuff that occurs to me throughout any given day. Interests, responsibilities, worries, data and information coming in from outside sources, etc. ​​​​ I also created some frames with different sized openings. The frames represent my attention span, or my

I began this project, as I do with so many, by painting on fabric- cotton in this instance. I use a wet on wet process, and let the paint flow freely. I'm trying to capture the colors of the leaves in early fall, a particularly poignant time in my memory as it signaled the return to school, and the end of summer freedom. Below is the fabric after it dried- I used opaque turquoise paint to represent the glimpses of sky that you see between the leaves. Now I apply wax to the

The topic of energy and Living Planet as the focus for the 9 challenges we are to complete, has captured my imagination and pushed me to explore a new technique. I am going to use colour and texture as much as possible in each challenge. The raw energy of the sun is vital to all life on planet Earth. Photos of the sun show a glowing, moving mass of solar energy and it was this colour and dynamic that I have tried to capture in my quilt Raw Energy. The black background is pain

I've mentioned before that my mother-in-law is Icelandic. We visited there as a family years ago and I fell in love with the rugged beauty of the country. Volcanoes, glaciers, natural hot springs, rolling meadows, lava fields, mountains and sea; it is so diverse! Iceland is home to the youngest island on earth: Surtsey. The island was born from a volcanic eruption, perhaps one of the reasons Iceland's moniker is the Land of Fire and Ice. I was fascinated by the natural resour

A recent stay at our family home in Pennsylvania sent me down a rabbit hole of memories. The willow tree in our back yard was like another sibling, I would climb up its friendly branches and read books after school. We spent a lot of time in the woods, too riding bikes through the trails until the streetlights came on and it was time to go in for dinner. I've done the willow many times in my art work, it's something that I really miss living in the high desert with its scrubb

I have had a busy month, diverting my creative energy from quilts into a renovation project at a beach unit we bought. We will use the unit for weekends and holiday time with family and friends. Many things in the unit were original from 30 years ago and we wanted to refresh it, as well as make it safer in line with today's standards. Below is a before photo. A qualified electrician installed new fans, air conditioners and a safety switch board for our power. Electricity is a