Dispatches

February 2005

In this Issue:

Pleased to Introduce...
Priscilla Kibbee
Jean Biddick

In the News

Design Exercise

Books to Consider

Happy New Year! With longer days and warmer weather on its way, can QBL be far behind? I always find a lift in spirit and renewed creativity with the lengthening of the days. I am sure many of you have spent all winter making quilts; don’t forget to enter them in the QBL quilt show! Entry forms were included in your registration packet, or may be downloaded from the terrific NEW QBL website.

This month we introduce you to a new feature in DISPATCHES. There are several extraordinary new teachers to add to the already extraordinary list of QBL faculty, and we will be introducing them to you in more detail than the brochure bios can provide. We also return to the regular features, complete with design exercises and book lists.


When you do not know what you are doing
and what you are doing is the best—that is inspiration.
Robert Bresson, French Film Director



Pleased to Introduce…

QBL welcomes Priscilla Kibbee and Jean Biddick; they will be great additions to the QBL faculty in 2005!

Priscilla Kibbee

Priscilla Kibbee of Wolcott, New York has been sewing since childhood, and her first purchase after high school was a Singer sewing machine. For years Priscilla made all her daughter’s dresses and her tailored suits for work. In 1979 everything changed when she discovered a beautiful quilted vest in a shop in Vermont. It was $50.00 which Priscilla says her “New England thrift thought was too steep”. After searching for months for the right pattern, she made two vests, a jacket and a dress for the same $50.00, and was hooked on quilted wearables! As ‘they’ say, the rest is history.

By the early 1980’s, Priscilla was teaching quilted garments, and her work was beginning to be featured in quilting magazines. By the 1990’s, her work was being featured in exclusive boutiques in Washington, D.C. and was being juried into national quilt shows.

In this period Priscilla expanded her audience dramatically through extensive foreign travel, including teaching quilting to schoolchildren in Nepal, to quilters in Turkey, and to seamstresses in Thailand. As was bound to happen, Priscilla also began to collect ethnic textiles, and to incorporate them in to her garments.

Priscilla won Best of Show for Fiesta at the Santa Fe Wearable Art Conference, and taught there in the Conference’s last year. Her work also has been featured in the 2000 Fairfield Fashion Show, the 2003 Bernina Fashion Show, and of course at the Schweinfurth!

Priscilla’s outfit “Tiger, Tiger” was shown in the 2004 Bernina Fashion Show at the Houston International Quilt Festival, was included in their book entitled Fashion and Imagination, and can be seen on the Bernina website at the Fashion Show link. Her work also is featured in the new Bernina DVD shown by Bernina dealers, and she will have a garment featured in the next issue of the magazine Belle Armoire available soon.

For more information, please visit Priscilla’s website at www.priscillakibbee.citymax.com. Perhaps we will see her influence in the 2006 QBL Quilts and Wearable Art Show!


Jean Biddick

Jean also began sewing at an early age. She remembers using the sewing machine before she was ten when her family moved form Pasco, Washington to Piqua, Ohio. According to unpublished reports, she staked her claim to the family sewing machine at age 4 when she, having just learned to print her name, scratched it into the top of her mother’s sewing machine cabinet. That machine now belongs to Jean, and in the right light, “Jean” is still visible. What a great story!

Like old family quilts, most quiltmakers I know have a story about the roads that brought them to quilts and quiltmaking, and many who began making quilts before the revival of the mid 70’s made quilts with the information available at the time. The books were old, great cotton fabrics scarce, and we made do with what was available and affordable. Jean is no exception.

If you know Jean’s work, you know it is rich in detail. It should be no surprise then that her first quilt was a crazy quilt she began when she was thirteen. Jean continued working on her crazy quilt (not sewn on foundations!) on and off for about 10 years. While it is still unfinished, it certainly was a great place to start! In her mid-twenties, when Jean’s friends all started having babies, she used up lots of scraps from dressmaking to make baby quilts. In the best tradition of old, double knots, corduroy, kettle cloth, terry cloth, seersucker, and everything else imaginable made it into those quilts. (If you are a newer quilter, you probably do not know what kettle cloth is.) Jean thinks she made 25-30 of those tied baby quilts in about 5 years. Perhaps Jean’s productivity habits were established with all those baby quilts.

In 1980, Jean’s mother gave her a book called Quick and Easy Patchwork on the Sewing Machine. By the end of January, she had pieced, machine quilted and bound a full sized sampler quilt. PHEW! Three years later, Jean began teaching machine piecing techniques.
With lots of practice making quilts for her children, parents, sister and friends, Jean’s repertoire grew as her skills did. Traditional pieced blocks remained the starting point of her quilts, and often the initial block was chosen because its name was also a reference point. For example, “California Star”, a traditional block whose center is an Ohio Star, seemed the perfect choice for a quilt made for California friends who had Ohio roots.

Jean says she loves geometry and jigsaw puzzles. Drafting geometric designs, playing with her children’s spirograph and seeing how things fit together is fun. Jean realized while taking a class with David Walker that she thinks in jigsaw puzzles not in collage, and which is probably why she makes pieced quilts and not appliquéd ones.

A few years ago, vacation took Jean to Cornwall, England and the Truro Cathedral. The floors at Truro “just begged to be turned into quilts” and while Jean had never planned to work in a series, the floors changed all that. The intricate designs led Jean to a whole series of new techniques. First, she had to draft the designs from photographs, which is “tricky, but enjoyable. Experimenting with freezer paper as a piecing aid for the intricate designs opened up a process that required her to make decisions as she worked, and deciding how small she was willing to work sometimes made it necessary to simplify parts of the original inspiration source. Jean says she loved this process, and found that while it was fun to use the original designs as inspiration, the adjustments needed to piece the actual quilts allowed her to make the finished designs her own. Jean says she loves to teach and to give her students the tools they need to translate their ideas into pieced quilts.

If you would like to see the quilts inspired by the floors at Truro Cathedral, please visit her website at www.jeanbiddick.com. One of the quilts in this series, Looking High and Low, won First Place, Innovative Pieced Large Quilt, at the Houston International Quilt Show in 2004.

I will use my editorial license here to say that I have known Jean for many years, and for a while taught with her. So with first hand knowledge I can say Jean is a consummate technician whose love of teaching comes through to her students.

Stay tuned to Dispatches for more on the NEW FACULTY
at QBL in 2005



In the News

Returning QBL faculty also have news to share.

Sylvia Einstein has been accepted to her fifth Quilt National exhibition in 2005. She also is participating in “Rooted in Tradition: The Art Quilt”, a three day symposium being held at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Colorado, June 3 through 5, 2005. The symposium will run in connection with the blockbuster exhibition “Rooted in Tradition” featuring outstanding art quilters from all over the world. Sylvia will be an exhibitor as well as participating on a panel at the symposium. (www.rmqm.org) Sylvia will also exhibit and teach in Einbeck, Northern Germany in May of 2005, and in 2004 she exhibited in Berne, Switzerland and taught in Durban, South Africa. For more information, please visit Sylvia’s website at www.sylviaeinstein.com.

Dianne S. Hire will be featured in the 13th segment (4/23 and 4/24) of the new American Quilter television show, airing for the first time on January 29, 2005. On the show you can see Diane’s quilts, studio, husband, gardens and Maine coon cat. The show will be on the Lifetime Real Women Channel. Check your local listings! Diane also has been nominated by her students for the 2005 Teacher of the Year award sponsored by The Professional Quilter magazine. This award, given for the last 18 years, was awarded to Mari Stori last year. Diane says that while only one of the teachers nominated will receive the award, it is an honor when students place a teacher before the selection committee.

Natasha Kempers-Cullen will offer four sessions in her More Is Better Institute in 2005. Sessions will be held March 26 & 27, April 23 & 24, May 8-13 and September 11-16. For complete information, please visit Natasha’s website at www.natashakempers-cullen.com.

Sue Nickels and her sister Pat Holly are writing a new book on Machine Appliqué to be released in late 2005 or early 2006. The book will feature details of the techniques they used in making “The Space Quilt” which won the 2003 IQA Master Award for Machine Artistry as well as the 2004 American Quilter’s Society Bernina Machine Workmanship Award. The new book will also feature techniques used in their previous Best of Show quilt, The Beatles Quilt”. Sue introduced a new line of threads at Houston in 2004. Called Tone on Tone, the threads are 100% Egyptian cotton with subtle variations; great for machine quilting and appliqué. For more information, visit the Superior Threads website at www.SuperiorThreads.com, under the King Tut line.

Emily Richardson received the Quilts Japan prize from Visions 2004, Quilt Visions San Diego, Oceanside, California. Emily hopes to travel to Japan in July. The Gross-McLeaf Gallery in Philadelphia will again feature Emily’s work in a two-person exhibit with Nelda Warkentin from March 29 to April 9, 2005. (www.grossmccleaf.com).

While she is not teaching at QBL in 2005, Elizabeth Busch has taught several times in the last few years. Her long-awaited web site is now available; for a grand tour of the diversity of Elizabeth’s work, visit www.elizabethbusch.com.



Design Exercise

Express the tension of opposites.
Be whimsical and create something silly.
Let the child inside of you play.
Eric Maisel

Symbolic doodles, just for fun…

• Divide a sheet of paper into six equal sections
  (Make a grid, or fold the paper into 6ths)
• In each compartment, make a doodle with the following themes:
  - yesterday-today-tomorrow
  - restrain-respond-free
  - sleep-awake-action
  - compression-ignition-exhaust
  - stimulus-response-result
• Keep going if you would like-the themes are basically
  Before-During-After

Adapted from Art Synectics by Nicholas Roukes



Books to Consider

The list below is the second installment of a long list generated one of the last nights of QBL 2004 by a group of students and teachers, who, in the course of conversation, discovered a common love of books. If you are new to this newsletter it bears repeating that QBL is a most remarkable experience for many reasons, one of which is the number of teachers and students who share a love of reading. I look forward to the discussions of books that pop up in all kinds of places during QBL, and the list I go home with always keeps me going all winter. I hope the list below is as helpful to you.

Also Consider:

Off Season: Discovering America on Winter’s Shore by Ken McAlpine.
If you love the beach, and if you have ever had the opportunity to spend time there in the quiet months, you may find this book speaks to what you love about that experience. While I wish he had concentrated more on the northern coast, I loved reading about the “real people” who inhabit summer communities. As one of those natives, it was always such a pleasure when Labor Day hit and all the tourists went home.

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle is not a new book, but one I discovered on the “new paperback” rack a few months ago. Not usually a fan of non-fiction, this book is both fascinating and gripping, and it reads more like a novel than non-fiction.

Until next time, Happy Creating, and please remember to send me information!

~Kathy
qblnews@aol.com

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