The Fabric Collage Finish Line: Quilts from the Quilt Gallery, Part 2

This is it—the last post from my Montana classes, for this year at least. And it’s a good one.

In The Fabric Collage Finish Line: Quilts from the Quilt Gallery, Part 1, I mentioned that a lot of finished quilts (and their makers) found their way to see me while I was teaching at the Quilt Gallery in Kalispell, MT for two weeks in June. Between past students returning to take another class from me and those just stopping in to say hi, there’s oodles of new quilts to share in these posts—all originally generated from classes I’ve taught at the Quilt Gallery through the years. In the photo above, students from this year’s class admire (and nearly overwhelm) a visiting student from last year’s class as she shows her completed project (to be “unveiled” later).

So sit back and enjoy—beginning with Ruth Knoch’s “Montana” hummingbird (below), begun three years ago in, you guessed it, Kalispell, Montana at the Quilt Gallery.

---

Ruth Knoch

I first met Ruth in July 2016, in a class she attended with two friends who you’ll meet later in this post. I tell students to go big, and she did with this roughly 3-foot rendition of a 3-inch bird.

Ruth returned with her three friends in this year’s second class in June, bringing along her completed hummingbird quilt to show. She had fun with the collage process and made good use of colorful prints for this colorful creature. She explained that when it was time for the background, she wanted to do more than just the flower, but was stuck with just what that would be. A pre-printed landscape panel, reminiscent of the Kalispell, Montana landscape caught her eye. I do say that a good place to start when considering backgrounds is, what’s the story? And this background certainly tells the story of where this quilt was begun.

---

Antoinette Hettinga

In less than a year, Antoinette not only completed the quilt she started in June 2018, but she finished 4 others as well. The portrait below, of her husband was her first. As often happens, she ignored my gentle suggestions that she not start with a portrait of a loved one, but instead with a simpler subject. And also as so often happens, Antoinette managed just fine.

I finished my husband’s image in three weeks once I returned home from your workshop in Kalispell, Montana.  His image then sat percolating for two months as I was in doubt as to how to finish the background without taking away from the person. Finally, bit the bullet, and went for it.

 

Thank you so much for encouraging me through this process, especially through day two and three of the workshop.  I was determined to complete Hilary’s image so that he would look like he does in real life, and am very pleased.  Even he is very happy with the final product.

This year, Antoinette was back in class beginning a fantastic dual portrait of head-butting bulls, shown in-progress in last week’s post of Quilt Gallery class #2. In addition to her husband’s portrait, she brought with her four more completed collage quilts. Obviously, the fabric collage technique has struck a creative nerve with Antoinette and she’s off and running.

“Don’t Ruffle my Feathers!” is the title of Antoinette’s poultry portrait above. A lovely specimen—be sure to check out those fantastic rooster feet (click on these and any photos to see them larger). Look closely and see if you can determine the vegetable print the legs are constructed with. Antoinette shared that the toes are spliced from starfish arms. Isn’t fabric collage wonderful?

Speaking of toes, her cute little tree frog collage below, has a lovely bulbous set of them.

Antoinette worked a 3-D aspect into her collaged vegetables. I tried to capture their dimensionality in the photos below. It was fun to hear her describe her perfect finds of upholstery fabric threads, flannel, and scrap jute to complete her vision.

I think my favorite quilt that Antoinette shared with the class is the one below—this bird has personality, looking like an anthropomorphized portrait of someone’s old flowery aunt. Endearing to me is the fact that I’ve got some of that very dated background rose fabric in my own stash—just goes to show that you never know what’ll work. Antoinette could have used any number of fabrics for the background, but that particular choice tells a story to me.

And in this quilt as with the vegetables, there’s dimensionality with her eyelid and lashes. Nice touch, Antoinette.

---

Cynthia Chaddick

Let me refer back to that first quilt in this post of a hummingbird by Ruth Knoch. Ruth attended that 2016 Quilt Gallery class with her friends Cynthia Chaddick and Kaye Burns. Those three were back together in week #2 of this year’s 2019 Montana classes where they all brought finished quilts to show: Ruth’s hummer, Kaye’s horse “Bubbles” (more on that later), and Cynthia’s “Joy!”—her self-portrait with elephant, begun in the 2016 class, continued in two of my Maine retreats, and now finished!

Earlier this year in a special Finish Line post concentrating on Cynthia and Kaye’s friendship and collage quilts, Cynthia shared the following about her inspiration for this double portrait she had begun:

I like working on life moments, memories of events, etc. I love doing Susan’s style and working with her—because I always learn. I am now working on a piece—not so whimsical as others I’ve done—but an image from my 60th birthday—called “Joy!” I hope to finish it this year ”“ but as usual, I set very high expectations for myself by including a self portrait and working with a poor quality photo. But I think I will love it!!

In the 2016 beginning of this collage (above photos), Cynthia concentrated on her face. As she said, the photo wasn’t ideal, but when you’re in Thailand, caring for an elephant for a day, you’re dealing with a vacation snapshot—so you make do. Cynthia had already taken one class from me, and she knew that slow and steady was the name of the game. By the end of the week she had a very good “first draft” of her self portrait.

She took time from “Joy!,” completing two other collage quilts (see friendship post link above), before getting back to this quilt. In my Advanced Quilt Retreat, Portland, ME October 2017 she came with some of the elephant now done, and focused on making this mostly submerged creature an understandable image. This is where the quality of the photo really came into play. The side of the elephant’s head was cast in shadow and Cynthia had a lot of work ahead of her to bring out as much contour and detail as possible. In-progress photos from that class are below.

Last year, at my Advanced Maine Retreat, October 2018, Cynthia arrived with the purpose to finish the collage work on this piece—with concentration on her completing her hands. Progress in fabric collage sometimes means taking away what you’ve already put down. Cynthia understands that and is fine with it. Those final progress photos are below—click on any of them to see them as a slide show.

This quilt is titled “Joy!” because of the joy Cynthia felt that day caring for this animal. I imagine that it was also joy that she felt when the final quilting stitches went in and the quilt was finished. She took this collage through so many stages, many of which I refer to as “messy scary” stages, a normal part of this process. But she stuck to her vision, did the work, and what a grand memory quilt she now has. Congrats, Cynthia!

---

Kaye Burns

As I mentioned earlier, both Kaye and Cynthia were the focus for a Finish Line post I called “Friends in Fabric.” That post finished with Kaye’s most recent quilt (to date). She brought that finished quilt of her horse “Bubbles” to this year’s class at the Quilt Gallery to share the story, but also for me to see him finished. To see Bubbles in progress, check out the link above.

From Kaye:

Four of us [with Cynthia, Ruth, and “newbie” student Cindi Guridi] did a fun road trip from California to Kalispell to do the class together. We all had a great time at class as well as at our cabin afterwards. Three of us had been to the Quilt Gallery for Susan’s class before, so it was fun for us to see the new store and all the wonderful staff from last time.

Kaye has taken several classes with me both in Montana and here in Maine. She works quickly but with great precision, finishing (large) quilts at an astonishing rate. Her pup portrait “Cinder,” was begun in the second week of my June 2019 trip to Kalispell, and was no exception to the rule. She had that quilt finished about four weeks later.

My husband, Larry, and I rescued Cinder three years ago from someone who could no longer keep her. She seems happy here with us and her new family of dogs, cats, horses and chickens. She especially likes to walk out to the barn to tell our horses who is the real boss here!

From the beginning of this portrait, Kaye was able to portray the soulfulness of this dog. I love seeing how in the beginning stages of a collage, the image begins to emerge from the foundation fabric. Kaye has the experience to bring out the features in her animals with very little changes needed, adding even more to the illusion. Again, click on any photos to see them larger.

Kaye helped to bring out the softness of her dog’s personality with her fabric choices throughout the process, choosing many floral prints in soft orange and peach colors, giving Cinder soft ruffles of fur, and eventually a fairy-tale background behind her. She also made another cute fabric choice that she describes below. You can see that fabric on Cinder’s back in the photo above. Lucky pup to have found her forever home.

This is a portrait of my dog, Cinder. She is very sweet and likes to sing when the phone rings, so I tried to work in some musical fabrics. The background is a single piece of fabric called Arabesque. I quilted it myself on my new ‘mid-arm’ babylock Tiara.

---

Donna West

Donna got a head start in this year’s class by purchasing the Fabric Collage Online Master Class Manual. Her experience helped her progress rapidly in the June 2019 class, joining Kaye as one of my most recent students who has already finished her project—hard to keep up with these ladies. Coincidently, this is one of two quilts featuring a pair of sandhill cranes that have been begun in Quilt Gallery classes. The other, by Pat Andrews, follows later in this post.

Donna also has an art background, painting if I remember correctly, and it came through in the way she was able to work with the colors, values, and prints in the fabrics to create the elegant curves of these birds. On the last day of class, Donna was far enough along to consider a background for the pair. A sunset possibility is pictured above.

When she sent me the final photos and write up (below), she had gone a different direction for the background—calm and serene—working perfectly with the birds themselves.

[This] quilt was created from a photo I took at the Bosque in New Mexico where the sandhill cranes winter. They come to the ponds in the evening where they can stand and sleep on the sandbars. This helps protect them from predators. The ponds are close to a road providing an excellent opportunity for photos. I have wanted to create a quilt from that photo for quite awhile but had not been successful. Susan’s class was the perfect setting for me to accomplish my goal.

These photos show the nice detail and contrast Donna was able to work into the definition of the feathers. I especially like those elongated tail feathers and the multiple prints used in their construction.

---

Joan Anderson

Joan is yet another student from my June 2019 trip to the Quilt Gallery—a prolific bunch to say the least. However, Joan was in the first week’s class, and one of two from that group of ladies already finished.

When she sent final photos, she also sent a write-up describing why she chose the subject she did.

Inspiration came from looking at Susan’s work. I wanted to learn her technique. I am fascinated with American large animals as my summers are spent in Idaho, where moose are in our yard daily. We are in grizzly habitat and this is why I wanted to create a bear. This first day… I failed the class. But with Susan’s teachings, help, and guidance … I finally got it. Then I was off to the races. So much fun.

I’d like to make a correction, Joan didn’t “fail” that first day (I don’t like that word). You could call it a hiccup, but not a failure. I’m just happy we had a little talk when we did. You see, Joan came with all the bright prints and colors you see in her bear. Yes, things got messy and scary on that first day, they always do. Then on one of my rounds, Joan had purchased new brown fabrics. Very pretty brown batik prints, but realistically colored, for a bear. The brights were set aside.

That’s when I asked her to tell me why she chose a bear, what’s the “story.” She told me what she wrote above, and that she had wanted to do it with the wild fabrics she had brought, but obviously it wasn’t going to work. So we talked values—it’s all about value. You can use any fabric if you keep that light and dark value in mind. We came up with a light to dark value “plan” with her bold and colorful fabrics, and like Joan said, she was off to the races.

---

Judy Deeter

Another student from my June 2019 Quilt Gallery first session, Judy had taken a class in Kalispell, 2017 as well, creating a giraffe in that year.

This time around, it was a quilt of “Duke,” made as a gift for Judy’s cousin. Duke’s progress would have been included in the post of that first week’s class, but Judy contacted me and asked that I wait until she had presented the quilt just in case the image got out on the internet, and her cousin got wind of it.

As you’ll read in Judy’s letter to me below, there was no doubt that this dog would be her subject. He also had to be white. And it was kinda funny how Judy broke that news to me. On the first day of class, she was a bit apologetic that she needed to use whites for this dog—it was a gift and had to be recognizable by the recipients. Apparently, I have a reputation for “alternative colors,” but really, I can cope if I need to. I do warn students that working with light colors or values on a light foundation can lack the excitement to keep you going through the tough moments. Judy got it, and worked like the Energizer bunny—she just kept going—and created a very handsome white dog.

Here’s Duke’s story from Judy:

Well Duke has been formally presented to my cousin Joanne, and there were many tears shed. This project has been in my mind for a little over a year since Duke passed away, as he was the beloved fur child of my cousin. At the same time my mom had just passed and although I dearly wanted to make a quilt for her I just could not at this time.

As I was coming to the Quilt Gallery in Kalispell this year, for my second class with you… Duke had to be the subject. I spent many hours finding the photo, enlarging it and attempting a good tracing for the quilt. My downfall was the nose and mouth… no matter how hard I tried it just didn’t seem right.

 

Thankfully during the class, you set me on the right course and Duke started to come alive. My concentration was full and I worked like a crazy woman and finally by the last day I could see my quilt really appear… much exhaustion and a few tears later… there was some reworking to be done at home and the background to plan.

Upon my return home, I continued to bring some new fabrics into the quilt, even some upholstery cloth was placed for the fur on his legs, where the sun was the brightest. It had a shiny and rough texture so was perfect for the area.

I continued to audition background fabrics and decided to have a glued collage type of background… ala Susan… and used some pictorial batiks that showed wildlife, the mountains, woods, and fish that were all part of Dukes’ life with my cousin and her husband.

The final step was the quilting and I used my longarm machine with the scoop foot and not one problem with going over the tiny shreds of fabric that made up his fur and tail fluffs. The quilting was very soothing for me, the final bit of love that made him glisten in some spots and have dimension in others.

 

I used my usual batting, some 100 weight threads, some metallic threads and my usual bobbin thread without issues even though in spots there were three or four layers of glued fabric.

There were a couple of times I wished you were standing beside me Susan, for advice, but I did mostly muddle through on my own, but did enlist some “second opinions” from my husband and two good friends….

 

So it is with heartfelt thanks that I present to you, Duke the White German Shepard, finished and presented and duly loved by all. I found it hard to say goodbye in the end as we had quite a bond after 3 months of work, but he needed to go home! ❤️

---

Pat Andrews

Halfway through my second week of teaching in Montana this year, Pat stopped by with her friend and co-student Dana Leech, from last year’s Quilt Gallery class in June 2018, bringing their finished quilts to show. I had just given my “backgrounds” morning talk and the crowd was primed to swarm the two and inspect the quilts. That’s when I took the “paparazzi” photo seen at the beginning of this post.

Pat wrote that she owned my book Serendipity Quilts, so she was familiar with fabric collage before she came to that class. The two cranes she collaged were from a picture she took in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2017, where the cranes spend their summer. It’s fun to speculate that they could be the same two cranes that Donna West photographed in New Mexico during the winter!

From Pat:

I had the blue and orange color scheme in mind when I went to the class, so I had plenty of fabric on hand. I finished the bird collage in class, but decided on the background after I got home. I didn’t want to have a realistic background. I decided to contrast the curved lines of the cranes with straight lines in the background.

Long necked and long legged birds such as cranes, can pose dilemmas for backgrounds—there can be a lot of empty space to fill. Pat did a lovely job with using patterned fabric to suggest the landscape without having to create it in a realistic way. The background is filled with a nice balance of shapes and visual texture. Plus, I couldn’t have asked for a better examples (with Dana’s quilt seen next) to cap my backgrounds class demo.

---

Dana Leech

Also having been in that Quilt Gallery class of June 2018,  Dana showed great timing this year with her finished duck portrait. She shared that feeling of creative exhaustion that hits when working for days on a project. It was a good thing for this year’s class to hear as they were mid-way though a 5-day week.

Dana admitted that she had thought to stop with the one duck at the end of her class (in-progress photos are below), but a fellow student urged her to complete the pair.

Dana used that idea of a “pair” as a take-off point for her background, literally writing, “The Two” in latin as, “Quod Duobus” at the top of the quilt. One thing led to another, and in the style of a handwritten journal, Dana collaged words cut from a printed fabric to create a “conversation” between these two birds.

It’s a speculative and unexpectedly entertaining background that you should be able to read for yourself if you click on the photos above to enlarge. In case you can’t, here’s how it reads:

Thank you and love to you all in the family—tell Mother not weary herself about me—home safe again, healthy as ever—you could tell him—I know no more since last Fall—sending my best

 

Yesterday again he was in about me—doing that, but I got over that in two days. Another thing,—I wish you would let family all in.—I wish you would answer

 

Forgive me for being so ugly and headstrong—I have found out what a home is—tell him I will try and behave—I will try my best—I will make it all right with you

 

I am as, sending my—for doing that favor—Regards

---

Barbara Barrett

Barbara was also in last year’s June 2018 class with Pat’s cranes and Dana’s ducks, but Barbara’s bird of choice was an owl—a Great Horned Owl. She didn’t show up in class this year, but she did recently send me a couple beautiful photos of her finished creation.

Below are in-progress photos from the class.

The detail photo below shows Barbara’s nice use of the prints found in fabrics—most are printed batiks in this case. By cutting out and around the shapes she saw in the fabrics, she could then use them to interpret the textures and contours of the owl’s face and body. She also used many different colors in this portrait, but in the end, it looks quite realistic. Beautiful job.

Barbara wrote to me:

The workshop was a fabulous creative experience. I had such a good time.  I returned home excited to continue. I was doing great until I got to the owl’s legs! Oh did I fret over them! I wanted them to stand out but nothing worked until one day I tried yellow. Bingo!…The background was another puzzle with many false starts. I finally went back to “the story”, where is the subject?  I hear owls at night but they are hidden in shadow and foliage. This led to a very dark midnight green, with two brighter green prints collaged in a few places around the edge for foliage…I did struggle quilting the owl. I painstakingly glued down all the edges but apparently not good enough. The presser foot hung up many times. Changing from an open toe to a closed toe foot helped…. Susan, thank you for all you do, for sharing your talents, and for the encouraging and supportive atmosphere of your workshops and blog. All the best, Barbara

You may notice the printed notice under Barbara’s finished owl collage photo. This is included because she used a photo she found online at wikimedia.org. Use of the photo required her to give credit to the photographer, and must stay with the image if it is shared elsewhere, such as this blog post. She also licensed her work under the same terms, meaning if someone then made an image based on her fabric collage quilt, they would have to credit both Barbara and the original photographer.

While this might seem excessive to some, I find it refreshing. In two blog posts, I explored the issue of copyright, in very simple terms. To read those click here and here. In this age when images can be spread with a keystroke or a mouse click, it’s more important than ever to give credit where credit is due.

---

Carol Anselmo

Finishing up for this week, I’m coming full circle back to the 2016 class at the Quilt Gallery—the class that Ruth Knoch began her hummingbird that opened this post. It seemed like a good strategy for wrapping up this Montana series of posts.

Carol Anselmo attended that Quilt Gallery class in July 2016. Usually when students bring a picture of an animal to class as their subject, it’s one of a live animal. This was not the case for Carol, her subject was of a marble lion outside a building in London.

From Carol:

I photographed the South Bank Lion during a trip to London with my daughters in 2016. It was one of the images I prepared for the first class I took from Susan, in Kalispell that summer. Because the statue is gray, I thought it was time the lion enjoyed a little color. The most difficult part was the sky which took three tries.

Carol certainly did give this fellow a “little color, ” but she also gave him a mighty presence. With just the right selection of fabrics, she created musculature and visual weight in her interpretation of this statue. And third time was the charm for the sky background. It’s simple yet effective, placing him above the viewer and “master of his domain.”

Carol tells me she is enthusiastic about all the ways she can learn fabric collage: my book, the Fabric Collage Master Class, and in-person classes having now attended two—the other was in Sisters, Oregon—but that’ll be another story, when that quilt is finished.