chard, kale and mustard leaves

Vegetable Leaf Table Topper, 2009, 13" x 36"
COLLECTION OF GRACE LYNCH

This lap project has accompanied me on many excursions since the holidays. Last weekend I finished up the hand stitching on the Clipper, coming home from a weekend in Victoria with my parents.

All the piecing is scissor-cut. I like the organic look that comes from the non-precise shapes.

To finish this project, I need to hem 20 dinner-sized napkins that are in the turquoise- and wine-colored vegetable leaf fabrics. Then I will ship the runner and napkin set to Grace Lynch in New Jersey—the guardian angel of my daughter, Victoria, at CIA . Grace has a humongous collection of Portuguese cabbage leaf china that she uses at family gatherings.

The ceramic dachshund was made for me by my daughter Vik in a high school art class.

marbled fabrics

At The Beach, 2008, 37" x 13"

Through Piece Makers I took home a thick stack of marbled fabrics. Most of the pieces are a foot square and while many have matching dye colors, no two are alike.

Maurine Noble is the person who marbled the fabrics. When I asked her how many months it took her to dye them all, she said “One afternoon.”

The fabrics are truly inspirational. I used some of them in a table topper for an Art Chix project entitled “At the Beach.” I liked how the swirls in the marbled patterns reminded me of waves in the ocean. I made the edge of the runner wavy and cut the binding on the bias so it would stretch around the curved edges.

art chix

Visionary Landscape, 2008, 40" x 14"

“Visionary Landscape” was the theme for last night’s Art Chix meeting. From our group of eight women, projects ranged from a 3-D photo with homemade 3-D glasses to monoprints to paintings to color photos to an unfinished quilted table topper by me.

Presenting a fabric piece was a bit of a stretch for the theme. I was working hard to complete the table topper and ran out of time to do something different. The whole-cloth runner is hand-stitched with a metallic thread and skinny hand-dyed silk ribbon.

One of my early ideas was to color and collage on top of a landscape blueprint. When I called my inside connection at an architectural/ environmental firm, I couldn’t get a drawing. That squashed that concept instantly.

I had a few other ideas but none of them inspired me much. Just maybe my desire to spend my free time quilting overcame all other creative urges. And can’t an intriguing runner transform the landscape of a mere table?