Watercolor Coneflowers is my quilt for the Fall 2012 Blogger’s Quilt Festival. It’s a small art quilt that I’ve been working on to donate to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (which has already raised over $773,000 to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s and fund research). Both of my parents suffered from Alzheimer’s, and you can read more about why I support AAQI here. Continue reading
Tag Archives: AAQI
A Cardinal for a Cause
As a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, it pains me to say this, but Congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals on winning the World Series. Although the cardinal on my quilt looks a bit like the ones on the St. Louis uniforms, it was inspired by the cardinals that visit the bird feeder outside our kitchen window.
I made Winter Cardinal (9 inches by 12 inches) as a donation to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. Both of my parents suffered from Alzheimer’s, so supporting the search for a cure is very important to me. Continue reading
A Quick Way to Develop a Color Palette (Photoshop Elements)
Sometimes when creating a design (fabric or otherwise) it’s helpful to work with a fixed palette of colors. The inspiration for a color palette can come from anywhere, and I find that photos are often a great source of color palettes. In this post, I’ll show how to quickly create a color palette (called a color table in Photoshop) from a photo. You can then use the color palette to create your own designs.
This post compliments a couple of my previous posts where I talked about how to color-reduce a photo in Photoshop Elements, and then how to generate a Color Table from the color-reduced photo and use the color table to create coordinating designs. Continue reading
Why I Make Quilts for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative
About a week ago I was featured on the AAQI blog after 
Ami Simms asked me about the artist’s statements for my recent donation quilts. Here’s what I wrote:
Here’s a bit of the reason I make quilts for AAQI. Both my parents died from Alzheimer’s disease, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2006. Continue reading
Fading Memories
I made Fading Memories last year as a donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative, which is a non-profit group raising money for Alzheimer’s research (over $520,000 so far!).
My parents both suffered from Alzheimer’s. This quilt portrays them as young adults when they each served in the Navy in World War II. The fabric in the quilt is made from photos taken over the course of their lives — representing all the memories that faded as the Alzheimer’s progressed. Using family photos, I created a montage, and then printed the montage in five different values (light to dark) on fabric. With this fabric, I created the ‘cut out’ portraits of my parents from their Navy portraits.
The back of the quilt shows the photo montage along with a more recent photo of my parents.
Fading Memories – back
This quilt is my post for the Spring 2011 Blogger’s Quilt Festival.
My Cone Flower Quilt is in the May Auction for AAQI
One of my small quilts, Cone Flower, is part of this month’s quilt auction benefiting the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. This non-profit, all volunteer group has raised over $520,000 for Alzheimer’s research since 2006.
Below are some of the other quilts. You can see all the quilts up for auction (and place your bids) here.
Here’s Cone Flower, my quilt in the auction:
You can see a short video of the new traveling exhibit Alzheimer’s Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope here.
More AAQI Quilts
I finished the last 3 of my recent batch of small quilts for the AAQI. These each started as photo that I took and then played with in Photoshop before printing on fabric. I finished each of these using the stabilizer ‘frame’ that I described in this post. There’s a size limit of 9 by 12 inches on the AAQI quilts, otherwise I’d have made the frames a bit wider for each of these quilts.
Pink Daisy was actually a plain white daisy in my back yard, but the magic of Photoshop let me change the color. I had fun playing with different free-motion quilting patterns on each of the petals.
I took this photo of Delicate Arch at about 6 a.m. on a blazingly hot summer day at Arches National Park. The sunrise was beautiful and it even made it worth getting up at 4:30 and hiking 1.5 miles uphill to reach this spot.
Purple Orchid is from a photo of an orchid that I bought at Home Depot for about $10 several years ago. It bloomed spectacularly for quite a while, but it’s been dormant for a couple years now. Guess it might be permanently dormant at this point.
The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. If every flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.
Therese of Lisieux
There are several ways of looking at Delicate Arch. Depending on your preconceptions you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified cowboy chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geologic freak, a happening—a something that happened and will never happen quite that way again, a frame more significant than its picture, a simple monolith eaten away by weather and time and soon to disintegrate into a chaos of falling rock.
Edward Abbey
Fireworks
After my parents died, I put off sorting through all their old photos that were in boxes in my basement. Last year I finally went through the boxes and found some amazing things that I didn’t expect, including a couple journals that my mother kept when she was a girl. Here are two pages from her 1937 journal, written when she was 14 years old (I’ve included a typed transcript below each entry since I could never read my mother’s handwriting).
Sunday, July 4, 1937 (185th Day—180 Days to Follow)
Independence Day
Shot fireworks all day long. Had one swell time. Following were at picnic at lake: momma, daddy, Esther, Carl, Lill S, Gladys, Alvin, Lilly H, Dolores, Aunts Lue, Lena, Anna, Minnie’s M. and W., Uncles Otto and Fred, Aunt Carie of Libertyville, Walter, Laura Hinty and Dick, Willard and Armela also. Laura and Dickee are staying over till tomorrow. When it was dark we shot off a lot of fireworks which we had a lot of. Got ice cream after all was done.
Monday, July 5, 1937 (186th Day—179 Days to Follow)
Laura went home today but Dick is going to stay till Saturday. After supper went to Crystal Lake to see the fireworks display. There also was a carnival there. Dick, Dolores, and I went on a lot of rides at the carnival. The fireworks were swell. Everyone says they were the best they had ever seen. For the finale there were 50 rockets in air at once. Got to bed at 1:00 o’clock A.M.
These journal entries were the inspiration for my latest donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative — Fireworks.
I had fun playing with metallic threads to try to capture the sparkle of fireworks. I haven’t used metallic threads very much, and I learned a few things with this quilt. I used two different types of thread–a flat glitter hologram thread (such as the gold on the right side), and a metallic thread (such as the blue on the right). Both of these threads are from Superior Threads. Superior recommends using a size 90 topstitch needle for both threads, but I found that a smaller size 80 topstitch needle worked best for the flat glitter thread, and a larger size 100 topstitch worked best for the metallic thread. I had no trouble quilting with the metallic thread, but I found that the flat glitter thread behaved much better when not stitching over other threads. I ran into a lot of thread breakage when I tried to stitch the flat glitter thread over the metallic thread. When using these types of specialty threads, I found that a bit of patience and experimentation leads to better results.
You can look up at the stars and every night they’re going to be in the same place, but you can launch a six inch shell and you don’t really know what it’s going to look like until it actually performs.
James Sousa
Fireworks are an art form that uses the night sky as the canvas.
Larry Crump
Two New Small Quilts for Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative
I just completed two more small quilts for donation to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative — a great charity that I strongly support since my parents both suffered from Alzheimer’s.
My mother was an avid gardener, a writer of gardening books and an award-winning photographer. While I didn’t inherit her gardening talents, I did start taking photographs at a young age. Both quilts are based on photos that I took of flowers in my back yard. I edited the photos to remove some of the detail, then I had them printed on fabric.
Daylily is about 8 by 6 inches. 
Coneflower is about 10.5 by 8.5 inches. I really like this flower because it’s a bit different with its yellow-green tipped petals.
Winter Cardinal Quilt
I recently completed this small quilt–it’s about 9 inches by 12 inches. It is a donation quilt for AAQI (as soon as I get around to sending it in). We have a bird feeder right outside our kitchen window, and at this time of year, the cardinals that come to visit are one of the few bright spots in the yard. Often we’ll see several male and female cardinals sitting in the pine tree, waiting for their turn at the feeder.
The quilt is made from a single piece of hand-dyed fabric with a piece of rust-dyed cotton/silk for the branch, and then lots of thread.
Color On Cloth 