Lisa Call

Melody Johnson and I had an interesting email conversation the other day about the quilting part of our artwork. I love to quilt my quilts. I love the process, the look, the texture, etc. I don’t necessarily love how much time it takes but I’m not planning on giving it up anytime soon as I feel it is an integral part of my artwork.

You can read Melody’s opinion about quilting her quilts at this point in her career on her blog along with some of my comments about it. Her reader’s comments to that post were quite interesting also.

Basically my thoughts are that many a quilter ruins a nice piece of artwork by scribbling all over the top of their quilt because they haven’t any ideas on how to quilt the thing, yet they feel obligated to quilt it. So they make all these fancy “free motion quilting” patterns all over a really sophisticated design. I think it looks out of place to do this unless the quilting patterns some how tell the same story that the composition is telling.

As I told Melody – if you don’t want to quilt the thing – then don’t! But scribbling all over the top with some fancy stitches showing off skill in free motion quilting isn’t going to make it a better piece of art. Fully integrated and thoughtful quilting that enhances and supports the quilt is what is needed.

More about quilting next week as I’m in the process of trying to quilt and finish up 20+ quilt tops that are ready to be completed pieces of artwork.

I was at Joann Fabrics this weekend. I don’t often visit these huge craft meccas as they don’t sell anything I buy except the occasional spool of thread. I find them a bit overwhelming.

I had my kids with me and my almost 14 year old son picked up a project book with instructions titled “Your Guide to Creativity” and said:

“In addition to tacky knick knacks you can also buy oxymorons here.”

 
Very perceptive kid.

I’m back. Thanks to everyone for email and comments about enjoying my blog – they did mean a lot to me.

I’ve spent the last month doing a lot of thinking about my art and my art career and how this blog fits into the picture.

I’m not sure I came to any conclusions or definite ideas but there are some murky thoughts that are starting to take shape and I’ll be talking about them over the next few weeks as I get back into blogging.

A couple notes about admin changes going forward:

-At one point I posted that I’d only be responding back in the comments section instead of sending private email. I didn’t do a very good job following through on that but my goal is to follow through with this in the future as I really love the conversations that can occur this way. If you ask me something or comment about something look for a response in the comment section.

-I was posting up to 5-7 times a week before I took a break. While I do love writing about my work I felt at times the blogging was done in lieu of doing the artwork. Now I’m going to try to focus on a better balance. Going forward I’ll probably only be posting 3-4 times a week (or maybe less). I’ll just have to see where it goes. I do want to avoid feeling like I have to post every night.

I thought my first post should have a photo but I haven’t taken any over the past month so here is a photo from 2002. It was taken from the top of Crystal Peak and the view is of Quandry Peak.