Quilting Arts Magazine October/November 2020

Me and Kristine in 2012. I’VE BEEN THINKING A LOT LATELY ABOUT HOW ART INFLUENCES DIFFERENT PARTS OF OUR LIVES. My son’s guitar strumming filters into my home office and reminds me of concerts from the past. As I start humming along, his music makes the hours slip away. Likewise, I hear a podcast that mentions a painting by Van Gogh, and I’m transported to a museum and am standing in front of the artwork again, observing my daughter as she experienced the art in person for the very first time. Suddenly, the flowers I’m arranging take on new meaning. The serendipitous fall of light through a window creates a transparency effect when it hits a bowl, and the next thing I know, I’m pulling similar colored fabrics from my stash…

Dear QUILTING ARTS, I’m thrilled with my new subscription to QUILTING ARTS MAGAZINE. The articles, photography, and challenges are truly inspirational. As I journey from 30 years of traditional quilting to art quilting, I keep a copy of the newest issue by my side. “Wishart Slough” is an interpretation of a photo I took of a nearby landscape (a slough is a prairie waterway). The sky was created from Procion® MX hand dyes and the trees and reeds were fussy cut, rearranged, and fused. The water was a solid fabric enhanced with Inktense pencils. After free-motion quilting this landscape—and adding some hand stitching—it was attached to a canvas. Th is is a typical view but at harvest time the colors come alive. (Editor’s Note: Maybe that should be your next quilt, Laurel!) Laurel…

Vivien Zepf started quilting because she became besotted with the beautiful fabrics in a neighborhood shop. Today she often uses photography as inspiration, using what she sees to inform her process. The intellectual rigor of her work as a museum docent complements her creative pursuits. Vivien has had her artwork juried into national exhibitions and has appeared on “Quilting Arts TV.” vivienzepf.com Julie B. Booth is a surface design artist, teacher, and author of Fabric Printing at Home. She has written articles for Quilting Arts Magazine and appeared on “Quilting Arts TV.” Julie teaches numerous classes in hand stitching as an expressive art form, including telling stories and sharing memories in cloth and creating appliquéd and stitched works with a healing message. threadbornblog.com Jovita Revathi Vas is a self-taught quilter who explores tribal hand…

Yoshiko Kurihara in 2018, Yoshiko Kurihara held a solo exhibition at the Chiba City Culture Center in Japan. It was an amazing experience for her; she said, “During the five-day event, over 600 people visited despite bad weather due to a typhoon. I exhibited 30 large quilts (mostly created for exhibition at the Tokyo International Quilt Festival) and about 30 small works. Some of the small works were made specially for this exhibition.” This recognition is just one of many that have honored Yoshiko Kurihara and her art. I first interviewed Yoshiko in 2011 for the book ART QUILT PORTFOLIO: PEOPLE AND PORTRAITS. I was fascinated by the wide variety of gestures and expressions that she managed to convey with her elongated geometrical figures. Each year since then, when visitors post photos…

earamichia Brown has a colorful story and a colorful nickname. (Her given name is pronounced Ear-ROM-i-ka, but she also goes by the nickname Encyclopedia, like the boy detective from the ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN book series from the 1960s). “When I was very young, as early as two or three, my family says I was able to read the encyclopedia,” she said. “That’s how I got that nickname.” “I had an extremely traumatic beginning, up through the teenage years,” Earamichia said. “That probably informed a lot of decisions I made.” Despite the difficulties, she absorbed an appreciation for creativity in many forms. As a youngster, she was especially fond of World Book’s CHILDCRAFT: THE HOW AND WHY LIBRARY series and MAKE AND DO, Volume 11, in particular, which contained basic instruction on many…

as I embarked on my creative journey at the start of 2020, I had to decide what I wanted the next year to be about. As the year began, I was focused on vision and clarity and the start of the new decade. As you start looking at yourself, you are forced to create from a different place. I will do my best to describe this. Until last year, I was always hesitant to create any rendering of myself. In 2019, for the Sacred Threads show, it was the first time I finished and exhibited a quilt with my likeness, “Simple Joy.” I would start a piece and never complete it. After the Sacred Threads exhibit, the creative doors were opened. At the end of that year, I rendered a selfie in…