Dispatches
April 2005

Spring!! At last. Maybe…hard to tell…one warm day then snow. Flooding…

"Throw open your window and let the scenery
of clouds and sky enter your room."
Yosa Buson

This month we get an “up close and personal” look at two new QBL faculty, Nancy Bales and Patty Hawkins, and get an update from some familiar QBL faces. There are more books to read about and a fun design exercise to play around with while you think about your next project. The best news is that QBL 2005 is just around the corner!


In this Issue:

Pleased to Introduce...
Nancy Bales
Patty Hawkins

In the News

Design Exercise

Books to Consider

Pleased to Introduce…

QBL welcomes two additional teachers to the faculty this year, Nancy Bales and Patty Hawkins.


Nancy Bales

Nancy Bales is a very familiar face at QBL. She has been attending as a student for as long as I can remember, and has had many wonderful quilts in QBL quilt shows.

As was true with our other new faculty for 2005, Nancy began sewing early. She says she has been making clothing since junior high school, and not just any clothing. Nancy learned clothing construction and tailoring from her mother and grandmother. She was introduced to quilts during the bicentennial in 1976 when there was a resurgence of interest in quilts and quiltmaking. Since no one in her family made quilts, Nancy bought a commercial pattern (the tissue pattern turned out to be a square!) and used leftover dress fabrics to construct the quilt. The pattern did provide instructions about how to layer the backing and batting and how to tie the quilt. With all the magic of rotary cutting, can you imagine starting a quilt with a tissue pattern of a square??

Nancy reports her next quilt was a log cabin, queen sized, which she both hand-tied and quilted in the ditch on the sewing machine. “Sounded good at the time!!” she comments. It was at this point Nancy joined her first quilt guild. She even told them she knew how to quilt. Nancy’s formal quilt education began with a class where she was taught how to draft templates, from cereal cardboard no less. The sampler quilt that resulted was made entirely by hand, and won a prize at the State Fair. Since she was also interested in clothing, Nancy started to take classes in quilted clothing where she made a “plump quilted vest.”

As time went on, Nancy was encouraged by her guild to send a guild challenge quilt to the Schweinfurth Quilts=Art=Quilts show. She had never seen the show, and was surprised when her quilt was accepted, and even more surprised to see it hanging alongside quilts by some very well known quiltmakers. A guild friend also introduced Nancy to QBL, and persuaded her to visit on a tour day. Nancy says, “That did it!” (The next time one of the tour groups comes through your classroom, one of those quilters could be a future QBL teacher!) Nancy has attended QBL for many years now; taking classes in clothing, thread work, quilting, painting and dying.

Nancy’s inspirations are many. She says she has been inspired by her guild, all the teachers she has had at QBL, and by her own students. She loves to experiment with all the different techniques she has learned, and to use what best suits a particular project, whether it is a quilt or an item of clothing. Nancy also finds inspiration in the artwork of other mediums, and loves to visit galleries and museums of all kinds.

Many of you will be most familiar with Nancy’s landscapes that look so real you can feel the sensations and smell the scents of the location. The beauty of nature that Nancy experiences where she lives and in all the places she has visited is the inspiration for these quilts.

We could almost say Nancy Bales is a “home-grown” teacher, since she is from the QBL area. Nancy taught elementary school music for 30 years, mostly at Marcellus Central School, before her official retirement from teaching. She still continues to participate in several musical organizations, and teaches quilting to children in the public schools as well as at Patchwork Plus in Skaneateles. Nancy also teaches new Bernina owners how to use their sewing and embroidery machines as well as the embroidery software. Wherever she hails from, we welcome her talents to QBL!


Patty Hawkins

Patty Hawkins grew up in Louisiana in the 1950’s. She describes this as “an artistically stagnant time”, although she did learn to sew from her mother, a seamstress who taught her about color and the intricacies of sewing. Patty’s mother must have been an artist at heart; she was emphatic in teaching Patty that no matter what the accepted rule was (green and blue don’t work well together), she should follow what her own sense dictated. Patty says we can point to the beauty of natures’ color combinations for confirmation of this.

With much encouragement from her family, and a move to Colorado, Patty began watercolor painting 35 years ago. Later, the Craft: Poetry of the Physical exhibit at the Denver Art Museum in 1987, which included work of Nancy Crow, Michael James, Pam Studstill and Rise Nagin, was monumental in helping Patty realize quilts could be a much larger canvas on which to play with color, and she moved to quiltmaking.

Patty’s background as a watercolorist continued to influence her work as she moved into creating her own hand-dyed and dye painted fabrics. Patty says dying her own fabrics “really completely motivates me; making my own fabrics is truly like chocolate cake without the calories, just delicious beyond words.” Her fabrics give her a chance to work with many value contrasts in a minimal color range, and special dying techniques translate the influences she sees in the natural world. The patterns she finds in the Colorado scenery further influences Patty’s work, and often translate into the motifs in her quilts. Her quilts are a compilation of these influences, whether fragmented color washes used to create a mood, the scribbles seen in skyscraper windows, or the aspen trees, streams and river rocks Patty creates with her shibori fabrics. Presently her work consists of fabric collages/montages, representing fragments of ideas or influences, fragmented color washes brought together for visual impact, and stitched for visual texture.

Patty reports that the hardest part of being an artist is balancing the need for solitude to be creative with time for her nurturing artist friends and her husband and three grandchildren.

“Making art can be most powerful, hopefully encouraging viewers to see things with new eyes, and demanding more thought.” She says, “My eyes are constantly searching”, and that, she says, is the theme of her teaching and lecturing. I expect we will see Patty’s influence in the “Oohs and Ahhs” of the audience at the end of QBL!

This winter, Patty and her husband Wes opened a joint exhibit at the Longmont Colorado Museum on February 18. The exhibit featured Patty’s Art Quilts, and Wes’ handcrafted small wooden chairs. “What a treasure to exhibit together, and show our friends what fun we have making art!”

“Being an artist is a gift which must be constantly practiced.”
Patty Hawkins



In the News

Nancy Crow once again is offering “creative textile workshops” in her beautifully restored barn in central Ohio. Nancy will not be offering classes in the Fall of 2005, so this is a great opportunity to “immerse yourself in art without worrying about the hassles of everyday life”. Faculty this spring include Judi Warren Blaydon, Ned Wert, Jane Dunnewold, Carol Soderlund, and of course Nancy Crow. For detailed information please visit Nancy’s web site at www.nancycrow.com. Also on the website are details about the tours Nancy is offering this year.

Long-time QBL student Randy Keenan opened her first one-woman show at the Bouzard-Hui Gallery in West Caldwell, NJ. The show, open from February 26 through March 31, featured Randy’s Fabric Collages, Paper Pastiche, Quilts and Art Journals. Congratulations Randy!



Design Exercise

Paper Play

The challenge of this exercise is to complete it spontaneously, with out any “fuss or muss”. See if you can complete it in one hour or less.

1. Find 10-15 pictures in magazines that appeal to you. Select them quickly, without doing any planning about what you will create with them. You can select random pictures, or choose them with a common theme in mind such as “things that are round”. You can also cut out words or phrases that appeal to you.
   
2. Using a strong piece of paper as background (card stock, heavy drawing paper etc.) cut/tear/fold the pictures to create a composition. Don’t make it too big, 81⁄2” x 11” works well.
   
3. Challenge yourself by adhering some pieces to the paper (tape is the easiest to use) right away, and then add others to complete the composition.
   
4. Add a few words if you want to.
   
5. When you are done or time is up, whichever comes first, write a few sentences about the experience or about your composition. You can describe the mood of the piece, how it felt to make it with time restrictions, or, you could just describe what you see in the composition.
   
6. DO NOT look at your composition as “good” or “bad”! This is not a time to put on your perfectionist hat. The process of creating something spontaneously is the goal here; the outcome is not what is important. It is creative play, so have fun and enjoy it!

I find this exercise to be a wonderful diversion from the pressures of day-to-day “stuff”, especially when I am crunched for time. It can also be a great way to warm up when you are starting a new quilt. If you like the exercise, consider purchasing a book to make the designs in. Tablets of art paper work well, as do the inexpensive plain page journals sold in bookstores on the “bargain” table.

“Perfectionism is the enemy of art…Getting it right you may call it, or fixing it before I go any further. You may call it having standards. What you should be calling it is perfectionism. Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right…with fixing things…with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop…that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are…making and to loose sight of the whole.”
Julia Cameron


Books to Consider

Here is the last installment of the book list compiled by faculty and students at QBL 2004. I hope we can come up with more books to consider this summer.

Until next time, Happy Creating!
~Kathy
qblnews@aol.com

Past Dispatches
November 2005
June 2005
April 2005
February 2005
October 2004