Woo Hoo Best of Show!

Today I took my family to the Coastal Quilter’s Guild show where My wild women quilts were awarded Best of Show. I was pretty proud. My daughter in law, Suzanne, (the one in the San Francisco quilt that was in the West Coast Wonder’s exhibit at IQA Long Beach) said that being related to the winner of the Best of Show was like being with the David Bowie of the quilting world. She said that people turned and stared at me when someone said, “There goes the quilter who made the Best of Show quilts.” I was pretty jazzed!!!

Here are photos of me with the “Wild Women” quilts, and me with “Suzanne” at Long Beach. How dorkey to have you picture taken with your quilt… Oh well, I admit to a certain percentage of dorkiness.

This is me standing beside my quilts.

I am holding up the home town newspaper.

Vindicated, at last…

OK, scroll back to the post that I left entitled rejection. I wrote yesterday that I was going to be included in the studio Tour of the Carpinteria Valley Arts Council. I got a letter stating that they were having a show for the month of May that would include work by the artists participating in the Studio Tour ( includes a reception)- little gallery but local and cute. The same gallery that rejected the Wild Woman #1 piece that I now am entitled to enter in the show… Perseverence… or luck. I am so excited!!!

The show will be at the former Step One Gallery now renamed 855 At the Arts Center. It is on Linden ave in Carpinteria. It opens on May 2 with an artist reception on May 9 from 5:00-7:00.

Wild Woman # 2 in progress

Here’s #2 in the Wild Women series. I have finished the composition and am working on the threadpainting and the details. I am happy with how it is turning out. I especially like the highlights on the arm. When I walked into the studio this afternoon and looked at what I had done last week, I was disappointed in the arms because they looked so flat. I tried that little light piece and it was not enough. When I repeated the thin line in orangey fabric, it worked just fine. I will get the same thread that I do the face with and highlight it a little more with thread.

 It does not take that long to do  these, what takes a long time is the getting around to doing them. Hence the 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. I hope to have them done before September.

Last night my husband was watching a very scary video, and when he watches something I do not want to see I usually come out and sew. But just hearing the scary music from the video and the screams and all, I was too scared to walk across the driveway ane be here all by myself. What a baby… It was written by Dean Koonz, who writes psychological horror. I can deal with good scary, my favorite movie being Arachnaphobia, but if it is too close to reality, I get nightmares. Anyway, enough said.

I have entered Wild Women #1 (me) in a small show here in Santa Barbara at the Architectural Review Board’s gallery. That starts in March and runs for a month.

rejection, again

I This is my latest quilt. It is called Wild Women #1 and is the first in a series of quilts of myself and 3 friends after painting our faces and posing for the camera.

I know they say that you need to have a thick skin when entering your work in shows, but I think my work is great, and this quilt has been rejected from the last two shows I entered. WAAAAAH!!! One was a museum where my own group was showing and the other was a gallery.  I can understand the gallery as my work is bound and not framed, and there is possibly some resistance to quilting as “art”, but I still feel let down.  This morning I went to see the show that I was just rejected from and there was work in the show that I considered marginal as compared to mine. I guess it is true that  judges and curators are just people with their own taste and they choose work according to their own bias and from their own background. I just feel a little low. I am going to start entering the same quilt in as many shows as I can. Maybe someone will like it…