Hello to all festival go-ers. Welcome to Kit Lang Art!

Today I am showing you a piece I finished earlier this year, called "Hiraeth".

I  wasn't going to join the festival this year as I have wandered away from making bed quilts for awhile, but happily for me, Amy has an art quilt category this year, so here I am!

This little art quilt came about as a result of a challenge set by my contemporary quiltart group (The Drunken Quilter's Society - so called because our meetings occur over cocktails and dinner) - the challenge was to use the contents of a bag of scraps and embellishments given go us by another member; and to use something in it that we had never used before.



I lucked out on my bag with a beautiful rust-printed fabric and a stunning snow dyed poly-silk. The challenge part of the bag for me were the beads! Those who read my blog regularly know that beads are my Waterloo.  I am never able to use them in a way that pleases me, and inevitably, even if I spend hours and days applying them, I end up removing them in the end.

This time, I loved the beads, and so they stayed.


Some background quilting and a a few of my own scraps from my stash, and I was done.


This little rabbit is very much outside of my oeuvre and unlike anything I've made before (or am likely to make again) but I'm very happy I did!

Thanks so much for stopping by, and do check out the other work submitted in the festival. Thanks so much to Amy for hosting again!



P.S. - Previous entries from newest to oldest are here here, here, here, and here

and The Bloggers' Quilt Festival!  I'm Kit Lang, a developing fiber artist, in Toronto, Canada, and I'm glad to have you here!

Thank you to Amy at Amy's Creative Side for hosting this festival, and thanks to all the lovely sponsors who help to support it!











 

and the fall 2010, Bloggers' Quilt Festival!



I'm so glad to have you here and want to begin by once again thanking our fabulous docent/hostess-with-the-mostest, Amy Ellis (formerly Park City Girl) of Amy's Creative Side for all her hard work as well as our wonderful sponsors including InLinks (how great is it to have pics in our links on Amy's site?) for having this great festival that allows us all to connect to one another in one homey but worldwide quilting community! I'm looking forward to seeing some great quilts and making some new friends!


I thought I'd share with all of you my favourite quilt that I've made this year (thus far), called "Of The Moment".  It  was inspired by a sketchbook cover that Gennine Zlatkis created about a year ago.  I've been a follower of her blog for a number of years now and always find her incredibly inspiring.

 

Within a couple of days of seeing it, I went out and bought the silks.  I knew that I would someday make a quilt using that colour pallette - I even thought I might do lilac sea urchins and shells on the coppery brown silk!

But what happened instead, was that a few weeks ago I was in my sewing room and out of the blue decided that I wanted to make a really contemporary quilt. One that was "of the moment".  Inspired by the color field painters of the early 20th century and Geninne's colour pallette above, I wanted to make a quilt that was modern, genderless; that would look equally well hung on a wall or draped artfully over a couch, and that was, above all: contemporary.

And so I designed a quilt that used bold colour choices that drew your eye off the "page", that used strong, simple lines to give it a contemporary feel; and speaking of feeling, used all silks and straight quilting lines to give it a wonderfully soft hand.

I wanted to make the back a little less serious, but still evocative of the color field painters, and so I continued the geometric patterns and swaths of colour, but added a little "wonk" to make sure we all knew it was designed in 2010. :s:

And then I was done - I'd made what I hoped was a truly contemporary quilt - one that was "of the moment".

If you'd like to see my entries in previous Blogger's Quilt Festivals, you can see my entry in Amy's very first festival (and the third quilt I ever made!) here, and my second entry last fall, here.

Check out all the participants in the festival and their quilts by clicking on the button linky below:

It’s very exciting to be part of the Park City Girl: Quilt Festival - Fall 2009 once more.  My sincere thanks to Amy at Park City Girl and all of the wonderful sponsors for putting this together!

My entry – well – entries, will be a surprise to my regular readers. 

You see, I’ve been working feverishly on a quilt for the Festival and finished it last night at about 11:30 (talk about coming in under the wire!) but sadly – I have not been able to get any pictures that do it justice. I have tried any number of locales and lighting in our house and it just. wasn’t. happening. Not being a great photographer, I think I needed to move “the shoot” outdoors but it’s a rainy fall day here today - so even The Universe is not cooperating.  But maybe the Universe wanted me to move in a different direction.  ;)

So, I’m submitting two quilts that I’ve already posted here in my blog, both of which are examples of what I see as my “jumping off” point as a quilter.

What I mean by that is, when I made my first quilt about a year and ½ ago, I knew, while sewing away, that this was it. I mean, “It” with a capital “I”.  My heart was singing,  my brain was racing: I had fallen in love!  And I knew at a cellular level that this was going to be my passion for the rest of my life.


The sad part was that I was in no way prepared for this passion! As I was quilting that first quilt, I was dreaming of the next one and the next one and the next one, but I didn’t have the knowledge or the skills necessary to construct the tops I saw in my head. And I sure as heck wasn’t able to do the quilting!

So these two quilts, called Mans’ Fans (the chocolate one) and Baby-Go-Round (the graphic white and black) gave me hope. I’d made a lot of quilts before that, but even as I made them, I knew they were only practice runs. Because I knew I had to put in the time, learn the skills, practice, practice, practice (!) – and though I was moderately or sometimes very pleased with the results, they weren’t what I really wanted to make.


"Man’s Fans" on the other hand, was.  It was the second time that I made one of the quilts I saw in my head ( the first was the one I entered in the first Bloggers Quilt Festival ).  The construction of Man's Fans wasn’t what it should have been (in fact, the top was the third or fourth top I made, and that’s when I knew I really wasn’t ready to make those fantasy quilts!); but the quilting - oh the quilting!  was done fairly recently, and it was the first time I ventured into what I think of as “artistic” quilting territory.  When it was done, I was STOKED. *happy dance*


Again, I could see where I went wrong and what needed to be improved, but there it was! A whole quilt top and quilting, that I only ever saw in my head – right there in front of me!!! Could there be a better feeling in the world? (Okay, loving and living with my Beloved Spouse and children aside. :) ) 

Man's Fans excited me personally, because after completing it, I was sure that some day (maybe some day soon!), I would finally be able to make the quilts I want to make.


And the next one that I found amazing was “Baby-Go-Round”.

It’s a simple quilt, but  it was exciting to me because it was the first time in my quilting career that a quilt I conceived in my head came to fruition – exactly as I had envisioned it. Pretty exciting stuff if you’re a quilt nerd like me!

So, I thought I’d share these two quilts with you.  I know I have a long way to go - even as I write this, you should know, there is a quilt in my head that is dying to be made (I've had the fabrics purchased for it for almost a year ) and I think I'm going to be ready to make it soon.  My fingers are itching to cut and sew! 

I hope you like these two offerings to the quilting world.  I'm not where I want to be yet - but I'm on my way.  "Stay tuned" as they say. :)

And in the meantime, enjoy the Festival. I know I will!

With some encouragement from Amy at Park City Girl and my online friend Crystal as well as Beloved Spouse), I've decided to join in on the fun and play along.

So, this is my entry in Amy's "My Favourite Quilt" Festival!


               

It's the third quilt that I made, which I called "Saucy Divo" as it was for my dearest friend, a male opera singer. I wanted it to be as "saucy" as he is, so the fabrics in it are lame, chenille, silk taffetta, velvet, a lovely dark red batik and some others; all beautiful shades of a rich, luxurious red. And then I quilted it with metallic red thread!