Q150 – ET20 – New Quilt

Good Day,

Today Andy and I would like to present to you our 150th quilt, ET20.

ET20 is a commemorative quilt that we created to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Equality Florida organization.

ET20, specifically Equality Tampa 20, will be auctioned in support of Equality Florida at the 2017 Tampa Gala, February 25, 2017 at the T Pepin’s Hospitality Center, 4121 N. 50th Street, Tampa, Florida.

Andy and I are also designing and creating a sister quilt ES20 which will be auctioned at the 2017 St. Pete Gala in April.

The colors of ET20 are various shades of green and off-white which are representative of the Equality Florida logo.


Our draft designs of ET20 and ES20.

The dimensions of our new ET20 quilt are 70” wide by 90” long.

The quilt was created using 100% cotton. The inner top was sewn and constructed with squares and triangles which were all cut using Accuquilt’s Go! Big.  All 2-inch squares and triangles were pieced together in strips. Each strip was sewn together to create our design of cascading green squares and triangles on an off-white background. Each green strip is a diagonal pattern, based on the ET20 design.

The lettering for the Equality 20 at the bottom of the quilt was also cut using our Accuquilt Go! Big. Each individual letter was appliquéd.

Our quilting is based on the art-work of Keith Haring. We created stencils of similar characters and have quilted the complete top and all four borders with the characters. They were freehand stitched on our Janome 6300.  The quilted characters are our representation of the universal force and many persons sharing in our equality of mind and spirit.

Images of our progress –

Follow our work and updates at both our Quilts SB site and our Quilts SB Facebook page.

To see previously posted quilts, there is a visual grid presentation at the bottom of the Quilts SB page. Move your cursor over any mini-picture found there and click to see an enlargement. Move your cursor to the "Q#" link to see the quilt's details. If the quilt’s title is highlighted in yellow, it has found a home in a collection and is no longer available.

Please let me know if anything on the Blog site does not properly work. I’m always striving to make sure an ease of use.

If you are interested, and would like some more information of the available quilts, regarding costs, shipping, and insurance, please get in touch with us Quilts SB, at jsmith58@gmail.com.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

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Q149 – Lee Miller – New Quilt

Good Day,

Today Andy and I would like to present to you our 149th quilt, Lee Miller.

Lee Miller
JS AB 2016

Our quilt Lee Miller is a new and completely different type of quilt that Andy and I have ever attempted.

Elizabeth (Lee) Miller, Lady Penrose; a model, a photographer, a war correspondent, an actor and a photojournalist was born April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA, to Theodore and Florence (née MacDonald). Her father, Theodore, was a formative influence in her eventual career path of both modeling and photography. It was at her young age that he taught and used his children, especially Lee, in the pursuit of his amateur hobby of photography.

Lee Miller’s entrance into the world of modeling occurred, literally by accident, when at the age of 19, while in Manhattan she was prevented from being hit by a car by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue.

In her early life, after 2 years of being one of the most sought after models in New York, Lee Miller decided to journey to Paris with the specific intention of apprenticing herself to the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. “She had tracked him down in a Paris bar and stated that ‘I told him boldly that I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students, and anyway, he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you – and I did.’”

Paris became her schooling ground. Apart from the recorded fact that she was “the look of the moment”, (per art critic Richard Calvocoressi referring to her modeling for Vogue in the 1920s), Lee Miller was “the universal muse of the surrealists” as wrote Angela Carter. But she was more than that. Lee Miller “had a camera eye” and she began composing her own self-portraits and moved to doing fashion shoots for Frogue (French Vogue).

After a dissolution with Man Ray, with whom they both had discovered the experimental technique of solarisation – “a perfect surrealist medium in which positive and negative occur simultaneously”, (Haworth-Booth), a partial reversal of blacks and whites that creates a silvery aura, she opened her own portrait studio in New York.

By 1940 Lee Miller was in England where she worked with Brogue (British Vogue). During the war, she ended up back in Paris where she continued to create photographic images credited to her style of composition of the presence/absence of herself, at times being only visible in a reflection.

Lee Miller, working for Vogue, along with a number of other women of various other magazines and papers decided to circumvent the accepted practice of no female correspondents permitted in a combat zone, were “held back” by the Allied command until the Germans were driven from Paris. Miller was the only photojournalist to witness the American assault on the fortress of Saint Malo, as well as she was able to photograph the first operational use of napalm by the US Army Air Force. Almost immediately she was put under house arrest for violating the accreditation terms by entering a combat zone.

At the end of WWII Lee Miller was included as one of the first photojournalists to enter liberated Paris; turn up at Picasso’s apartment; cross into Germany; enter Buchenwald and Dachau; enter and visit Hilter’s and Eva Braun’s flat in Munich by then under US control, where she was photographed in Hitler’s bathtub with her boots and military uniform poised carefully on the floor and on a chair. A good many of her wartime photos achieve a surrealist perspective and acumen: “a bombed chapel, with bricks pouring from its door, resembles a mouth with a tongue hanging out; a grounded, ovid air balloon, with two geese in the foreground, is titled Eggceptional Achievement.”

She reported on and photographed France during and after the war. Lee Miller is credited for many photographs and interviews of a number of noteworthy individuals, newsmakers, and famous persons. She interviewed Ed Murrow, whom Miller believed created his stories and reports completely different from anyone else and of whom she attempted to emulate in her photographs. She interviewed the celebrated writer, nearly seventy-two, bedridden and very deaf French writer and novelist Sidionie Gabrielle Colette, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. She photographed and interviewed the arrival of Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich in her work and article Players in Paris during the war.

Per Ali Smith’s article The Look of The Moment (The Guardian, 8 Sep 2007) “It’s not just in her photography that Miller asks you to look again. Her voice is as sharp as her eye. It bouleverses a reader’s expectations, turns form and cliché inside out, punctures preconception.”

In summation, I quote from Liz Byski’s novel Gang of Four “‘She was some woman, that Lee Miller,’ said Steve, leaning across from her. ‘She did what she wanted to do and damn the conventions.’”

Lee Miller passed away July 21, 1977, in Chiddingly, United Kingdom.

The dimensions of our new quilt are 18” wide by 30” long.

Our design is a compilation (albeit mash-up) of works which Andy and I attempt to portray Lee Miller. The quilt is created using 100% cotton and silver vinyl superimposed with inkjet-printed fabric and tulle.

Images –

To see previously posted quilts, there is a visual grid presentation at the bottom of the Quilts SB page. Move your cursor over any mini-picture found there and click to see an enlargement. Move your cursor to the "Q#" link to see the quilt's details. If the quilt’s title is highlighted in yellow, it has found a home in a collection and is no longer available.

Please let me know if anything on the Blog site does not properly work. I’m always striving to make sure an ease of use.

If you are interested and would like some more information of the available quilts, regarding costs, shipping, and insurance, please get in touch with us Quilts SB, at jsmith58@gmail.com.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

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Q148 – Sonia Delaunay – New Quilt

Good Day,

Today Andy and I would like to present to you our 148th quilt, Sonia Delaunay.

Sonia Delaunay
JS AB - 2016

Sofia “Sarah” Illinitchna Stern aka Sonia Delaunay, a multi-disciplinary abstract artist and key figure in the Parisian avant-garde was born on November 14, 1885, in Grahizhsk, Ukraine. As a child, she went to live with and was adopted by her wealthy uncle Henri Terk and his wife, Anna in St. Petersburg, Russia. In St. Petersburg, she received a privileged and cultured upbringing but her childhood memories of the Ukraine and the memories of ‘pure’ color and the bright costumes of peasant weddings did manage to maintain a reference point for her future career as an artist and textile designer.

Her education in drawing continued in Karlsruhe, Germany. At the age of 20 Delaunay moved to Paris and enrolled at the Académie de La Palette where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists.

Sonia began her career as an abstract artist when in about 1911 she began making a blanket (a quilt) for her son composed of bits of fabric like those ones seen in the homes of Russian peasants. When it was finished, "the arrangement of the pieces of materials seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.”

Sonia Delaunay spent most of her working life in Paris and, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colors and geometric shapes. Simultanism or “simultané” is an element of Orphism practiced by the Delaunays. The name comes from the work of French scientist Michel Eugène Cheureul who identified the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous contrast’, in which colors look different depending on the colors around them.

Her fashion and design work extended to costume and sets which she created for both theater and film, including work on Diaghelew’s ‘Ballet Russes’ around 1918. In 1924 she opened her own company and became well-known for her innovative designs in dresses and handbags.

Her first solo artistic exhibition was held in 1908 at the Montparnasse Gallery in Paris. Having exhibited her work in and at many venues and locations, Sonia Delaunay was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964. In 1975 she was named an officer of the French Legion of Honor, one of the highest decorations in France. That same year she painted the poster for the International Women’s Year of UNESCO. Her painting, “Coccinelle” was featured on a joint issue of British and French postage stamps in 2004. Her recognition as an artist was such that France’s President George Pompidou, on an official visit to the United States, brought one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings as a gift from the French government.

Sonia believed that “Color is the skin of the world. Color was the hue of number. One who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of cone color to another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery.”

Sonia Delaunay passed away in Paris on December 5, 1979.

Our quilt Sonia Delaunay is the technique of piecing and creating a composite mosaic of 100% cotton fabrics of solid colors.

The dimensions of our new quilt are 18” wide by 30” long. It is a pieced quilt in the form of a mosaic using squares and rectangles. Each square, and each square created by triangles are 0.8-inch square. We have attempted to capture the essence, strength, and spirit of Sonia Delaunay’s style and effort.

Our design is a compilation (albeit mash-up) of her works from one of the Vogue (left) magazine covers and her 1925 painting Simultaneous Dresses (Three Women) (right).

More images –

To see previously posted quilts, there is a visual grid presentation at the bottom of the Quilts SB page. Move your cursor over any mini-picture found there and click to see an enlargement. Move your cursor to the "Q#" link to see the quilt's details. If the quilt’s title is highlighted in yellow, it has found a home in a collection and is no longer available.

Please let me know if anything on the Blog site does not properly work. I’m always striving to make sure an ease of use.

If you are interested, and would like some more information of the available quilts, regarding costs, shipping, and insurance, please get in touch with us Quilts SB, at jsmith58@gmail.com.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

Click here to continue reading...