Blogger’s Quilt Festival 2014 | Sketches from an Olive Avenue Autumn

Hooray, it’s Blogger’s Quilt Festival Time!

Blogger’s Quilt Festival is a quilt festival for those of us that don’t get to go to Quilt Market and/or Quilt Festival. We all put a link to a post about our quilt on Amy’s blog  and visit the posts throughout the week.

My favorite aspect of this festival is the story that goes along with the quilt, I always try to feature a quilt that is important to me in some way.

This year, I want to share a very special quilt: it’s the culimination of everything I did leading up to the production of my second Quilting Arts Workshop DVD. I call it “Sketches from an Olive Avenue Autumn”.

New visitors may not know how I work: I dye all my own fabric, and really enjoy creating just the right combination of colors. Once I’m happy with a color palette, I name it and then work with it for awhile. I’ve been working with an awesome (if I do say so myself!) color palette for awhile now called “Autumn Splendor”:

When planning for my Workshop, the folks at Quilting Arts wanted me to use this palette, and I of course agreed as I’m really enamoured with it. In this DVD I show how I create fabric sketchbooks that I use to try out Free Motion Machine Sketching motifs and color palettes when working through ideas:

The main purpose of the workshop is to show folks how to Free Motion Machine Sketch, so I needed to share a few different birds, vessels and plants that I love to sketch with my sewing machine. I chose examples that for the most part are in my house/backyard; and since I live on Olive Avenue I decided that including Autumn and Olive Avenue needed to be in the title of the sketchbook!

Here’s a favorite page from inside:

Now, as I’m sure you can imagine, prepping for filming a DVD involves lots of work, and I needed to have lots of examples of how one could use these motifs. Although I had enough other examples, this quilt was in my mind as the culmination/summary of everything that I covered in the DVD. Helen Gregory (Vice President of Content at  Interweave etc…) kept telling me I had plenty of “eye candy” for the DVD without it, but I really wanted to stitch this “summary” art quilt! I really love the way I used the multicolor fabric in the sashing:, for the most part easing through the color changes as it travels down the quilt. Here are a couple of close-ups:

For the most part, I developed all these motifs specifically to teach them in the  workshop, my most favorite is in the bottom left here, an Agapanthus flower:

This quilt gives me great pleasure, because it represents a goal I was able to reach, and it really illustrates/summarizes who I am as an artist! Thanks for letting me share this with you! If you’re a new visitor and love color half as much as I do, I’d love for you to subscribe (links in the sidebar ->) and share my love of color in the future! 🙂