Quilts

Frittilaire Imperiale - The Crown Flower Quilt

2010-01-03T17:54:18Z

In the Spring of 2001 I had my first exclusive quilt show at Scott Potter's Gallery on High Street in Portland. This quilt was inspired by some of the gilded papers that he used in his exquisite decoupage work. This is the first quilt where I used silk as the background fabric, and also the first quilt where I used gilded thread for the quilting stitches. This subtle gleam of gold is not easy to capture in photographs but adds a sense of opulence and antiquity to the finished quilt. I wanted to create a piece that felt rich and ageless.

The floral design is still based on the eight fold Hawaiian style, but I hand painted on the dyes in a way that I had first experimented with on Fertility. You can almost see the blue/purple shoulders on the red Crown Flowers where the green dyes overlapped with the orangey reds in the flowers themselves. The floral design is all cut from one piece of fabric and almost completely fills the 45" square for this wall quilt. This quilt is available for purchase on my Etsy site.

Bountiful Harvest - A Marriage Quilt

2010-01-03T16:37:56Z

I made this quilt as a wedding present for a much loved nephew and his bride. These two people met and fell in love when they were very young. What I particularly admired about them was the way in which they loved each other without constraints. He went to college in New England and New York. She pursued dance here in Portland and then Boston. They saw more of each other when they both went to London for graduate work. It was almost 10 years after they met that they married and I have never seen a wedding so happy and well deserved. It was both a fitting end to the mutual respect and committment of their courtship and the wonderful beginning to their marriage.

Her symbol is the pomegranite -- beautiful and exotic, tart and sweet, reaching skyward. His is the squash fruit and blossom -- wholesome, grounded and sustaining. His design is around the outside of the quilt reaching inward....her's is in the center reaching outward and intertwined with his.

Both of these are fertility symbols and no small part of their Bountiful Harvest are the two beautiful children that they have created together. But I don't think the quilt can take all the credit for that.

Le'ia - I Make the Quilt and the Quilt Makes Me

2010-01-02T20:20:54Z

Le'ia was a quilt of transformation for me. This is when I realized that I make the quilt and the quilt makes me. I started this quilt after I had been diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis was not good.....six months or so is what I was told. It takes me eight months to a year to make a quilt this size so you can see where my head was at. I was being defiant. But Lei'a is not a quilt of defiance. It is a quilt meant to teach me about Abundance. I wanted to feel the Abundance of all the time in the world, all the love, and light and health and hope rolling out endlessly before me. So I chose to dye the background for this quilt the delicate colors of sunrise. And I chose Ulu or Breadfruit as the symbol. In Hawaii a Breadfruit tree symbolizes Plenty. Plenty of food, plenty of love and life, enough for you and the neighbors and the strangers passing by.....more than enough for everyone. It took me eight months to make Lei'a and there are about 250,000 tiny hand stitches in this quilt. And every stitch was a healing one.

The Hawaiian Quilts

2010-01-02T19:57:50Z

	Ahi o' Pele (Flames of Pele) is my very first Hawaiian quilt. This is a scan of a photograph, which is all I have as an image of this quilt. It was purchased by the State of Hawaii for it's Art in Public Places program and I was blown away by the fact that a piece of my work would be left in Hawaii after I was gone. The background is black cotton and the foreground is cut from one piece of red fabric, like the snowflakes we used to cut out of paper in grade school. The stitiching is done in red thread and echoes around the image. It evokes the red lava glowing in the cracks between the folds of the pahoehoe lava.
	Imagine my surprise when Lau Puka Puka (Leaf With Holes) was purchased by the State of Hawaii for the same Art in Public Places program and was hung outside the governor's office in Honolulu! I have a better image of this one since we had upgraded to slides. This quilt is 7 feet square and the leaves are about two feet across, which is exactly the same size as the leaves are in nature. In fact my son Blake and I went for a walk and picked a few leaves to use as patterns when I designed this quilt. It is a winter quilt, and the tiny green specks of the echo quilting stitches suggest the winter rains falling on the vibrant green of the wet leaves and the shiny black of the lava rock.
	Li'i Li'i Ahi Pua o' Lehua (Little Flame Flower of Ohia) is another winter quilt and was my third Hawaiian quilt. It, too, is 7 feet square and I used the green stitching as I had in Lau Puka Puka to suggest the winter rains. The Ohia trees have little paintbrush flowers that glow bright red against the olive green of the leaves and the greyish black of the Ohia trunks. This quilt was the last time that I used commercially dyed fabrics for my work. After this I switched over to hand dyes. This quilt is also the point at which the Hawaiian women in Hui Kapa Apana o' Hilo (The Quilt Group of Hilo) gave up on getting me to do Hawaiian quilting properly. My black backgrounds were non-traditional and the use of a third color is also not orthodox. This is when my friend Sharon Balai said I did "Irish Hawaiian" quilting.

Conversation

2010-01-02T19:38:50Z

Conversation is a quilt about marriage. The couple that commissioned this piece created a long and lasting marriage by combining children, extended families, interests, properties and business endeavors and they have done it by talking and listening. These two people have created an incredible network reaching out into the world by the close and intimate conversations that they have had with each other. That is what I created this image to convey. The Maine Birches are the favorite tree of the wife, the Morning Glories entertwining the leaves are evocative to the husband of his mother's beautiful gardens in Connecticut. I wanted a clear graphic symbol of these two separate, complex and strong individuals and I could see how the white birches against the black background would give me that.

But I also wanted to convey the beautiful complexity of all of their interlinking relationships of children, friends and family. In this detail shot you can see the individually dyed and sewn leaves and the intertwining morning glories as well as the many tiny stitches that hold the quilt together. I have been so impressed with the qualities of this couple and their relationship and I am pleased with the way that Conversation communicates what I see in them.

Threads of Meaning at The Salt Exchange

2010-01-02T18:44:44Z

	I was invited to do an exhibit of my quilts at The Salt Exchange at 245 Commercial Street in Portland last winter. The Salt Exchange hours are 12:00-2:30 for lunch and 5:30-9:00 Tues-Thursday, 5:30-10:00 Friday and Saturday. It is such a significant thing to see so much of my work in one place. I can easily see how one piece led into and influenced the others, how no quilt exists on it's own really but rather is created by the ones that came before it. I have said before, "I make the quilts and the quilts make me." That is so true, and evidently they make each other as well.
The one above is called Conversation and is 10 feet square. The birch trees are life sized. And here is Le'ia which is the Hawaiian word for Abundance. Again Le'ia is 10 feet square and the leaves and fruit of the Ulu (breadfruit) are life sized. Ulu is the symbol of plentiful food, family and happiness in Hawaiian culture
	This image is of one of my earlier Hawaiian quilts and is entitled Li'i Li'i Ahi Pua o' Lehua (Little Flame Flowers of Ohia). It is a more modest 7 feet square and the fabrics are not hand dyed. I have a particular fondness for it because it has a faintly Celtic quality, in spite of being a Hawaiian quilt. Sharon Balai, one of my accomplished Hawaiian quilting friends from the Big Island called it "Irish Hawaiian Quilting" and thought it perfectly reasonable that my ancestors should be influencing my quilts in subtle and pervasive ways.
And here is a close up of Cotton, again a 7 foot square quilt. You can read more about Cotton on this site. I am so grateful to my loved people at The Salt Exchange for having given me this opportunity to show my work.

Fertility - Hawaiian Quilt

2009-02-12T13:33:21Z

This is a full image shot of Fertility, which is an idea that I reworked from Lau Puka Puka, the Hawaiian quilt that is hanging in the Governor's office in Honolulu. Fertility was made after I left the islands and moved to hot, dry, brown, hot, dry, arid, did I say hot, dry Phoenix, Arizona. I was obviously longing for the green opulent growth of the Hawaiian rain forest.

The Moon Quilt

2008-09-23T13:47:05Z

This is the full image of The Moon Quilt which I made for my friend Thelma Smith www.thelmasmith.com/blog/ during my chemo year. the first year I was in Virginia. She had seen images of Na Keola o' Malama which I had made for my surgeon in Hawaii and wanted a smaller above-the-headboard size quilt for her bedroom -- something serene and uplifting she said. She dyed the background hemp/silk fabric herself since she was looking for a very specific blueish purple. I dyed the midnight green foreground fabric for the branches myself just before I left Arizona and did the applique very quickly once I got moved in. But the quilting took longer.

Cotton Quilt

2008-08-18T15:11:56Z

Cotton is for sale on etsy

Cotton was not only made in Arizona but is also inspired by the history of Coolidge and Randolph, two small towns about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. We lived in Coolidge for three years when Devan was in Middle School. Coolidge is a small town that historically has made a living off of the Pima cotton which grows so well in the irrigated, sunny soil. The Casa Grande ruins are in this little town and consequently we can infer that agriculture has been a big deal in this area for about a thousand years.

Because the Arizona climate is so unGodly hot I used to run on the dirt roads beside the irrigation ditches early in the mornings before the sun got too high. When the pima cotton started to grow the fields were awash in green with delicate pink flowers. After the cotton was fully developed the farmers would cut off the irrigation and let the plants dry out because that makes them easier to pick the cotton bolls off. And during that time of the year the temperature in the region is well above 100 degrees and the air is dry, dusty and hot, hot, hot. On my morning runs I began to wonder about the people who had moved into the area, particularly in the 30's, in order to work in the fields. I went down to the local historical society to see if I could do a little research.

The Latest Thing - La Bella Familia - A Family's Quilt

2008-08-17T16:44:06Z

La Bella Familia is finally finished and sent off. This piece took me longer to make than any other quilt I have ever done. And it wasn't because of technical difficulties or the fact that it is over 9 feet square. I have made other quilts as big or bigger in a quarter of the time (Conversation and Le'ia). It was a conceptual problem.