Elephant Mambo FPC

A fabric postcard for my brother, Chris, on his birthday.  I just love this elephant.

A Face in the Crowd

Back in 2002, while still living in California, I took an Art Quilt Class at UC Santa Cruz given by Therese May.  She is a well-known quilter in the San Jose area and had her original portrait quilt chosen as one of the Top 100 Quilts of the 20th Century.

This class was about drawing a simplified self portrait in 5 to 7 pieces, drawing this face onto 16 different fabrics, then carefully cutting them out such that the negative space piece also became part of the jigsaw.  Then the pieces were randomly interchanged such that no square was alike and no square experienced a fabric more than once.  This was quite fun to do.

I had completed about 80% of this quilt and then it got set aside until just recently.  Thus, about 12 years later I managed to complete my self portrait quilt.  I designed my face using an old silhouette woodcut that had been done of me in elementary school when I was about 8 years old.  Students shellacked them as holiday gifts for their parents.  My mother returned my woodcut to me when I grew up and left home.

I decided to deviate a bit from the plan and decorated just one face with some dimensional embellishments which brought me to the quilt title:  A Face in the Crowd.

Barefoot Mazzie Does Mardi Gras

Second in my series of Barefoot Mazzie quilts, in memory of my mother, here is Mazzie enjoying Mardi Gras in New Orleans.