Lisa Call

Ransom ©1999

 
I made the above quilt many years ago in a workshop with Natasha Kempers-Cullen. We spent the first part of the week hand painting and stamping the fabric with Profab textile paints and the remainder of the workshop creating original work with our new fabrics. It was a wonderful workshop and Natasha is a fabulous instructor.

Although Natasha’s work at the time was very much not like my work (of course back then I’m not sure I knew what my work was in the first place). She did a lot of shrine type work and I just couldn’t wrap my mind around that style. So I made a big ransom note. While everyone else was working with iconographic images and thinking deep thoughts I was hand cutting letters out of my fabric with my scissors and giggling. It was better than kindergarten, although we didn’t have any paste to eat.

I have always wanted to make posters or note cards with this quilt because I think it pretty much sums up most quilters thoughts about their fabric. And their chocolate.

But back in 1999 that would have meant a lot of effort. So the quilt just hung on my studio wall and entertained my rare studio visitors. Fast forward 8 years and now we have cafepress. So with a few clicks - tada - I have a shop to sell t-shirts and posters and mugs and even a mousepad with this image.

I ordered a sample poster and t-shirt before offering it up for public consumption and I think it looks great. The poster is amazing. The colors are bright and clear. The t-shirt (I ordered a direct transfer one) isn’t quite as bright but it looks more like the original quilt this way. The mousepad is looking a bit iffy on the website but I might order one at some point and see. Ideally I would have created a unique image for each product to optimize the placement of the image on the product but with the free cafepress shop I’m limited to just a single image for everything and at this point paying $5 a month for more seems like a silly idea.

So if you are in need of a t-shirt or fridge magnet check out my cafepress store and get yourself a couple dozen of these. They’ll make great gifts, or at least I hope so because I know what my family is getting for Christmas this year.

 
 
I’m leaving early tomorrow morning (oops I mean today) for my workshop with Nancy Crow in Ohio and I have no plans to blog while I’m gone. I’m hoping for this to be as low tech of a vacation as I can manage. Although I hear there is a computer where I’m staying so I will probably check email a few times. Tomorrow is also my birthday and I think this will be a wonderful way to spend it. Well except the airplane trip, and getting up too early after staying up too late - but after that - it’s going to be great fun.

I’ll be back in 2 weeks with lots of images and adventures to share.

 
About a year ago I went out to northwestern Kansas to celebrate my Grandma’s 90th birthday with much of my family. We drove out to the old family farm, where I spent time each summer growing up, and I posted some pictures here. It was really nice to see everyone but most especially my grandma.

I used to take my kids out to visit her as much as possible when they were little. While they played or watched TV, grandma and I would sit and talk about sewing. Her passion was making dolls of all sorts and she knew a lot about them so we could talk for hours about what she was making and where she got the ideas and what colors she liked to use. She loved her dolls and had a wonderfully large collection of them.

My grandmother passed away this morning so I will be going to the Kansas this weekend for the funeral.

My sister will fly out and we’ll drive over together so it will be really good to see her again even if the circumstances for us getting together haven’t been the greatest this year. My other grandmother passed away in September.

The quilts above are a pair of quilts I made for my grandma’s in 1993. Sunflowers for the Kansas farmers.

My grandma grew up and lived on a farm in Kansas most of her life. She belonged to the type of traditional quilting bees where everyone gathered around the large floor quilting frame to work on each other’s quilts. When my grandparents sold their farm back in the 80’s I got the quilting frame and have used it a few times to hand quilt my own quilts.

My grandma made many beautiful quilts but she eventually reached a point in her life when she could no longer sew but she was very interested in what I was doing with my quilting.

So about 6 years ago I went to Kansas to make this quilt with my grandmother, who was then 83. I pre-cut all of the triangles and squares for the blocks in the middle of the quilt and had her design each block with the fabrics of her choice.

Grandma really liked bright warm colors and we had a really good visit. She designed the blocks, I tried to keep up sewing them together, and we kept my then 4 year old daughter occupied by feeding her cookies.

Grandma’s Quilt 56"x56" (sorry for the poor quality image - click for a better view):

 
My grandma passed away yesterday so I’m flying out to Kansas for the funeral and will be back next week.

A few weeks ago I wrote a posting about my first “art” quilt, House Cleaning.

Right after completing that quilt I made a second quilt in the series. At that time I don’t think I had heard of the concept or term “working in a series”, as it’s not really a topic we covered in computer science graduate school. I guess this is just a natural way for me to work.

This quilt was completed in 1994 several months after House Cleaning. You can see I learned my lesson about trying to hang odd-shaped quilts and this one is pretty much straight across the top, at least enough so that I could attached the usual sleeve that holds a board so the quilt can be hung on the wall with just 2 nails.

This quilt was part of the 1994 Hoffman Challenge Traveling Exhibit and was also in the show Quilt Colorado in June 1998. For the Hoffman challenge you have to use a “challenge” fabric in your quilt, one that is manufactured by Hoffman. In 1994 the fabric was the butterfly fabric. They then have a competition and select many quilts to travel around the country to show off the new fabric (and quilts).

This quilt was made before I learned how to finish the edges without a binding. I think the butterflies as a binding really don’t look so good and this piece would be a lot stronger if it had no binding at all.

Spring Cleaning ©1994  43″ x 30″ (wxh)

In the past I almost always did fairly extensive piecing on the backs of my quilts. This quilt was no exception. I think the shape of the back of this quilt is interesting as it reminds me of a map of the United States.

 
I had always planned on making more “cleaning” quilts in this style but I moved from Virginia to Colorado in the fall of 1994 and my plans were disrupted and I never got back to it.

In thinking about it I see some similarities between these quilts and my new series of drawings: Plains. The same things interest me over and over again.

I was thinking yesterday after posting my drawing of the plant that I made a tree quilt several years ago. So I got out the pictures and thought I’d post them for comparison. This quilt was a bit easier to draw than the plant as it was winter and so no leaves!

I started this quilt during a workshop with Pauline Burbidge in 1999. I can’t recall the assignment at this point but it was the second major piece we worked on after doing some still life work.

I made this quilt not long after joining my first critique group and I was seriously intimidated. I made only 2 or 3 quilts the entire year as I was so overwhelmed and feeling very insufficient. So the artist statement is quite genuine. It reads:

During winter branches are barren but the trees are not dead. They are preparing for spring when they will bloom into life again. I have encountered dormant periods in which it appears I’m not producing anything of value but it’s during these quiet restful periods that I must remind myself to relax, renew my energy and dream of the wonderful things to come.

Materials: Commercial cotton fabric, paint, cotton batting, cotton thread.
Techniques used: Fuse appliqued, machine embroidered, hand painted, machine quilted.

I used the paint to cover the sky. The original background I had used was too bright and it ruined the feel of the piece. It was rather tedious to paint over it but in the end I think it was worth it.

Dormant Dreams ©1999   36″ x 14″

 
Detail:

 
This quilt was displayed at Images of Parker in 1999 and again in 2000 in a show my critique group had called The New Year of the Trees: Tu B’Shvat held at the Oregon Jewish Museum in Portland, Oregon.

The quilt sold during the show in Oregon, my first “real” sale of my artwork. While we all dislike writing artist statements, I believe that it is what sold this work.

Yesterday I was sitting at my cube working when the guy next to me pointed out the beautiful sunset at only 4:45pm. So it is with great pleasure I welcome the solstice.

I’ve done yoga off and on since 1982, when I took my first yoga class while at Berkeley (yes I know you just can’t get much more stereotypically than that). One of the more well known, and one of my favorite, asanas is Salutation to the Sun or Surya Namaskar. Today I think it is most appropriate to thank the sun for turning back my way to warm and lighten things up.

When I lived in New York from 1990-1992 I found a wonderful yoga instructor, Margo Jenni. I took the classes through my HMO, Kaiser Permanente at their office in Tarrytown. It was the most peaceful 1 1/2 hours of my week.

Margo was an amazing woman. She taught private yoga classes to the Delany Sisters, amazing women in their own right. I took classes with Margo up until a few weeks before giving birth to my first kid, and no I’m not posting the pictures of me doing a handstand while extremely pregnant. Let’s just say I was a lot younger then.

I moved to Williamsburg, Virginia when my son was only 2 weeks old, but before leaving New York I went back to see Margo one last time and presented her with this quilt. It is an original design (with wonder under Melody!) depicting the 12 steps for the Salutation to the Sun asana that we practiced in this class.

Sadly, the past few years my Christmas card to Margo has come back undeliverable from the post office so in honor of Margo and the solstice I present:

Salutation To The Sun ©1992 ~32″ x ~42″


 
She particularly liked how I quilted the piece.

I still have the patterns that I made for this piece in my notes. Amazing the things I’ve kept.

This quilt was made a little over a year before the quilt I posted the other day, Housework.

I promised my next post would have pictures but I have nothing new I’m ready to post. So it’s time for something old instead. My first original design contemporary quilt and a long story, as one of my goals with this blog is to document my history as a quilt maker and artist.

I started this quilt in august 1993 for a traditional quilt guild (Colonial Piecemakers in Williamsburg, VA) “challenge” competition. The challenge was to use the given a yard of fabric in a quilt and the membership would vote on winners.

I rather disliked the required fabric so I chopped it into long strips and started making a rather boring baby quilt that I thought I might donate to charity after the challenge was over.

But something must have snapped in my brain and suddenly I went off in a completely new direction from utilitarian quilting. I had always had a hard time following patterns when making quilts but I would consider myself basically a traditional quilter at the time I started this quilt.

I was probably headed in the direction of making original design work and this was just the right time for it:

• I was a new stay at home mom with a 12 month old baby so I’m sure I was bored out of my mind, not that babies aren’t fun, they just aren’t mentally challenging the same way a job or designing artwork can be.
• I was also active in the fledgling (by today’s standards) online quilt community (quiltnet) and I believe it wasn’t long after I started this quilt that an online group called “no-trad” began for those of us interested in more contemporary work.
• I had wanted to major in art in college but the man footing the bill vetoed that idea (hi dad) but I think I was always destine to end up an artist as I was always creating things (more on that another time). Some day art will be my only career, but currently that computer science degree I got instead is still in the way. Or maybe it is the mortgage preventing the change, which I believe was my dad’s argument in the first place.

Back to this quilt, which I named “housework” because I decided I would rather make a quilt with ugly fabric rather than clean my toilets any day. I always used my kids’ nap times as my quilting time. I never cooked or cleaned or did any of those housewifey type chores. And I very much believe that the quilting is what kept me (relatively) sane those very long and very challenging days and years (9 of them) as a stay at home mom.

Enough blah blah blah - here’s the quilt. As you can see I didn’t quite have my professional photography figured out yet. This was taken in my friend Kathy O’Meara Magnuson’s backyard in Chicago in August of 1994. I stopped by to visit as I was moving from Virginia to Colorado. This is the best photo of the piece I can find. You can see the “challenge” fabric in the center rectangle - it is the wider strips.

Housework  ©1994  ~80″ x 75″ (hxw)


 

I still own the quilt and it hangs in the entry way of my house. It’s a permanent installation as I never did really figure out how to hang the thing and with a combination of wire, hooks, nails and in the end packaging tape it’s been 15 feet up in the air for the last 11 years and I’m not moving it, ever. That’s my grandma’s treadle sewing machine below it.

When I cleaned out my basement last month I came across a notebook full of information about quilts I made long ago. It’s really cool, I’m apparently fairly organized. This is the original sketch for the quilt.

These are my construction notes. I have no idea what it all means (you can read it better if you click for the larger view) but somehow I managed to piece this thing together. I don’t have any recollection of how I managed to do this as at the time I had a very small sewing room, maybe 8′x10′ (and half the room was taken up by a floor quilting frame - so I had a tiny area). And no design wall so I must have laid it out on the floor somewhere. So those of you with small rooms, large work is possible, I can’t remember how I did it but I didn’t let space (nor a baby) deter me.

In the end I didn’t finish the quilt in time for the challenge . I didn’t have the binding hand tacked to the back of the quilt. So it was disqualified from judging. And it was also too big, the rule was at most 50″ on a side. Oops. I have a hard time with rules.

I did finish the binding in early 1994 and I even managed to take good slides of the piece (I didn’t have an SLR camera so again I don’t remember how I did this, or even where I found a wall to display it for the photography).

It was shown at the following shows in 1994 and then retired to the wall in my entry way:

• Quilters Heritage Celebration in Lancaster, PA
• NQA (National Quilt Association) Annual Show, Wheeling, West Virginia (I think)
• Quilts of Colorado, Pioneer Museum, Colorado Springs

And to my total surprise and delight it was even published in the premiere issue of Art/Quilt Magazine in 1994. I guess my slide wasn’t that bad as this is reproduced from the slide.

Clicking the link for the larger image will yield better results for the text.

I went back to my birth name post divorce although there are a few people about that still remember my old name. Both the date I made the quilt and the size are wrong in the magazine. It’s really closer to 80″x75″ and I know I didn’t finish the binding until January of 94.

When I think back on this quilt it was really quite a nice start to my pursuit of quilts as an artform. I was fairly successful with it and I think the publication gave me a lot of encouragement to keep going.

I’ve often said I don’t really like this quilt but having looked at it a lot the past 2 days while writing this I can see a lot of things about it that are really quite nice. It’s certainly not a masterpiece but I’m really quite proud to say that this is where I began.

And it does look nice in the entryway. I just hope the tape continues to hold!

The EveryDay Matters Challenge #41 - draw a city landmark. [I recently joined the EDM discussion group to think about drawing exercises in fabric. I’m cheating this week and using an old piece.]

I live in Parker, Colorado, where everything town related has a Victorian light post attached to it (check out the town logo on their webpage). I still don’t quite grasp how a small horse town on the prairie decided to be Victorian but for some reason it is.

I made this quilt in 1997 and entered in our local annual art show “Images of Parker” where it won Best of Show and was purchased by the town. It used to hang in the Mainstreet Center but it’s gone so I’m not sure where it went, and I’m afraid to ask!

This is by far the most representational thing I have ever drawn or used in a piece of my art. I’m still amazed it actually looks like a street light.

Welcome To Parker © 1997, 51″ x 45″

I was “tagged” in fellow The Fiber Connection member Dijanne Cevaal’s blog to write 20 things about myself. I’ve kept the list mostly focused on art and am using the opportunity to show a few of my older pieces, which have never been published on the web. Probably not what I was supposed to do but I’m not good at rules.

I only made it to 11 because this was getting rather long for a single posting. I’ll do the other 9 another day (maybe).

I believe I’m supposed to tag some other artists to do something similar so I’ll tag Joanie San Chirico and Cathy Kleeman. The other 2 Fiber Connection members with blogs.

1) I started backpacking in the mountains of New Mexico when I was around 8 years old. Being outdoors, away from the crowds, has always been important to me. I prefer the landscape of the southwest - mountains, deserts, canyons, dry prairie. And brown brown brown. The colors of nature heavily influence my work.

2) This is one of my canyon inspired quilts from my previous series “chairs”. These are purchased commercial and hand dyed fabrics as this was prior to my dyeing of my own fabrics. It’s interesting to go back and look at older work and observe how the work has changed.

Chairs #5 © 2000, 43″x35″:

3) I went on a week long backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon in 2002 and made a series of quilts about the experience. This is one of them, an abstraction of the layers of the canyon.

Structures #16 © 2003, 48″ x 35″:

4) & 5) These are 2 other pieces about the Grand Canyon capturing the colors of some of the specific layers. These are the last 2 “chairs” pieces that I made and a good 3 years after the bulk of the other work in that series.

Chairs #16: Canyon Layers - Tonto Platform © 2003 6.5″x6.5″:

Chairs #17: Canyon Layers - Red Wall © 2003 6.5″x6.5″:

6)I lived in New Zealand for 5 months starting in December 2001. My husband (now ex), a professor, was on sabbatical. So we took the kids, aged 4 & 8, and spent over half of the time living on the road, sleeping in our tent or in cheap hostels, seeing all the sights there were to see. New Zealand is beautiful and we had a wonderful time.

7)When in Rome and all that. So while in NZ I jumped off the 43 meter high (141 feet) Kawarau Bridge, the worlds first bungy jump site. It was the most terrifying but most empowering experience of my life. After facing my fear of heights and successfully jumping off that bridge I figured there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do. Yes that is me in the picture.

8) & 9) I really loved the rocks in New Zealand because they are worn smooth by all the water they have. I started a small series of quilts about those rocks. They aren’t very literal and I’ve been told they look a bit more like cookies than rocks but it was the smoothness of the rocks I was trying to capture, not the actual rocks themselves (for that I have photos and a few pilfered souvenirs). I like these pieces just they way they are because they absolutely capture the essence that so fascinated me. For anyone that has been to the southwest you will appreciate that our rocks are all jagged and rough (hence the name Rocky Mountains) so this was a big deal for me.

Stones #4 © 2002 19″x28″

Stones #6 © 2002 13″x27″

10) My favorite color is purple. But I seem to rarely use it in my artwork as I tend more towards the browner side of the spectrum. Okay so brown isn’t on the color wheel, except here in the southwest. This piece is an exception.

Structures #12 © 2002, 31″x21″.