The Quilt Show – prep time and the art of slogging in Charleston, SC

Last month I was incredibly honored to be a guest, filming for The Quilt Show with Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson. If you scroll down to the previous several posts you can see a little of my tour of Charleston, SC where the crew was on location for the week. Believe me, you are going to love the shows that they put together and the wonderful places and guests that they filmed. It takes time to produce these things and edit them so they won’t be up until later in the year.

I spent the better part of a month getting ready… only because I didn’t have any other major deadlines or teaching gigs coming up. It was nice to have more than a few days to scramble and get everything together. Still, some of you fabulous people came to my rescue and helped me get prepared in a major way. One little request and look what happened. This is only a small part of the stack!

Compared to most quilters, my stash if fairly minimal. I gave away almost all of my commercial fabric several years ago and only keep a small stack (less than 50 yards) of hand dyed fabric on hand at any one time. I would have more if I didn’t keep using it up for fabulous kits for my students. (You can take a look at some of them here on my Etsy shop. Don’t you want to join me for my upcoming studio class, Playing With Paint!?)

I filmed a segment on the elements of art based on my book. I got the wild idea that instead of showing my usual little art quilt samples, I’d use nine-patches to illustrate that these basic building blocks apply to even the most traditional patterns. My thinking was that The Quilt Shows’ audience has a LOT more traditional quilters than dedicated art quilters and they might tune out if I didn’t relate specifically to more traditional quilts in that particular segment.

But I didn’t have time to shop… so of course I turned to Facebook. I wanted a variety of blues to work with and WOW did I get them! You all are the BEST!

I spent a few days sorting and cutting and sorting some more. Until I ended up with this. Isn’t it pretttttttty?!!!!!!

Then I started piecing – something I haven’t really done for a very long time. Hmmm. There is a reason for that. I remembered that even though I can do it well when I pay attention – I get bored after the first three blocks. It’s painful for me to have to be precise. And in this case, I decided I needed to be precise. Ah the things we do for the love of art.

I suppose it’s a good thing to KNOW what you like and what you don’t. Sometimes there are parts of the process that you just need to slog through. But sometimes your work evolves so that you can eliminate parts of the slogging. That’s why most of my current work is whole cloth and surface designed…. or small and collaged and hand stitched.

Stay tuned – I’ll show you some of the blocks in the next post.
What part of your art process do you love,
what part do you hate,
and what part are you willing to slog through to achieve your final product?