Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Quilts For Sale

ALZHEIMER'S ART QUILT INITIATIVE
Priority Quilts For Sale!
Money is tight. The economy is wobbling. If you need a lift, just go look at these quilts. You might even find one that is within your disposable income limits. Or one that is just right for someone you need to buy a gift for. Throw caution to the winds! Or just dream a little dream. It won't hurt to look!

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Island Batik donates 25K! Amazing generosity! I tell 'ya, next time I'm buying batiks, I'll be checking for those by Island Batik!

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Mather Experiment

I volunteer for an afternoon program at my local nursing home - one of the many Mather Lifeways - and I'm always dreaming up new stuff to "do". Today I wanted to experiment with making art quilts, so I used SteamASeam on a bunch of different fabric scraps and came up with a sort of "kit". Background with stems already in place, and a sheet of transparency film with a bunch of cut out flower shapes. I used a plain white background, but fused it onto a colored back sheet because I read that dementia causes loss of depth of field vision in many. I put a black border on the transparency too but that was mostly for me - hard to keep track of those babies!
Now these are all ladies with fairly severe dementia, so the test was if what I gave them was enough information or not. Only one of the five ladies I had playing with me today grasped it right away and began to place the flowers on her own. One slept through the whole exercise and the other three needed me to peel the flowers off the transparency and hand them over. But all were able to get the concept of putting the flowers down on the fabric, although I got a lot of "where does this go?" questions. Anyway we ended up with 4 pretty cute pieces of fabric art, which I will now quilt and finish.

Now the goal is to donate these to the AAQI but I have to find out if there are any legal ramifications - these women aren't exactly capable of signing a consent form. But even if I can't donate them, it was a lot of fun and everybody was very impressed with the ladies' work and there were a lot of smiles!

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

New Priority Quilt

I've been spending so much time scanning quilts for the AAQI and working on the website that I haven't had time to be creative lately. I got a chance recently when my sister opened her new studio to my Mom and my sister-in-law. I actually worked on 4 quilts, but only finished one - and it's taken me weeks to get around to registering it . . . but TA DA! This one is called Heart of Flowers and my artist's statement reads:
I was in my sister's studio with an embroidery machine and scraps from other quilters laying around - and I couldn't resist using either of them!