Pet Project comes to Houston Quilt Festival for 2nd Year: Be A Part of It!!

Quite a few of you know Pokey Bolton, founder of Quilting Arts Magazine, Cloth Paper Scissors, and more.

Pokey is now the Chief Creative Officer at Quilts, Inc., and resides in Houston as a result.

Due to a personal experience rescuing an abandoned dog off the streets she became involved with "Friends For Life", the only "no kill" animal shelter in Houston.  

Last year was the first round of her "Pet Project", an event to raise money (and awareness) by asking artists to create and donate fiber postcards which were sold during the International Quilt Festival in Houston.  To say it was a success would be a massive understatement.  The cards were beautiful, popular, and they sold out long before the festival was over.  We need to do something about that!

I'm asking you to turn on your creative juices and help with this project.  One hundred percent of the monies generated go directly to the Friends For Life shelter.  

With permission, I am re-publishing Pokey's post from her blog.  Please go there for more information!

My fabric postcard of Nellie and Clarence, my two adopted pooches from Friends For Life

x

We are thrilled to announce the second annual edition of Quilt Festival’s Pet Postcard Project!  Friends for Life, Houston’s fastest growing No-Kill animal adoption and rescue organization, will again be the beneficiary shelter!

x

Several of us at Quilts have adopted animals from Friends For Life, an organization I admire very much for the work, education, and outreach they do for Houston’s most vulnerable animals who would very likely be euthanized if they weren’t in their program.

Salise Shuttlesworth, Founder and Director of Friends For Life and I are each holding up a fabric postcard from last year’s benefit.

x

Some may remember that we raised more than $20,000 total last year at Quilt Festival for Friends For Life by selling hundreds of donated fabric postcards for $20 each, and this year I am hoping to far surpass that amount! We are inviting YOU for this fall’s show to make fabric postcards to help us achieve this goal.

Here’s how you can help:

1. Make as many 4″ x 6″ fabric postcards (that are no more than 1/8″ in thickness) as you would like to be featured and sold at International Quilt Festival this upcoming fall.

2. We want you to get pet-ty! We encourage animal-themed fabric postcards but we certainly welcome and would appreciate other themes as well, such as abstracts, landscapes, floral pieces, etc. The point is to raise as much funds as we can! On the back side of the fabric postcard, please sign your name and title your postcard. (Contact information is optional.)

3. We will sell the postcards for $20 each at Festival, and all of the proceeds will go to Houston-based animal shelters.

4. These postcards can be mailed to the Quilts, Inc. office no later thanTuesday, October 22, 2013. Please note: this is a receive-by date! We will of course accept postcards during Quilt Festival but want to have a large starting bank of postcards so would love it if you mailed them in advance!

5. You can mail as many fabric postcards as you would like, but please place them in a padded envelope. This way they will stay in pristine condition to be displayed at Festival.

Please mail them to:
Pet Postcards
Attn: Pokey Bolton
7660 Woodway
Suite 550
Houston, TX 77063

6. Come to Quilt Festival and buy as many postcards as you are able!

If you would like to see some examples of fabric postcards (of the feline variety) we received last year, click here.

The good news is the postcards are starting to come in, and we would love to sell hundreds (thousands?) of them to raise a record-breaking amount to save animals’ lives.

x

I’ll be making lots of postcards over the summer months as I quilt poolside (while taking breaks with my little swimming buddie)!

Will you be taking the postcard pledge? I hope so!

Get Your Daily Sprinkles Here!

Greetings!  Today I'm playing with something perfectly timed since tomorrow is my birthday!  I love cupcakes, perhaps a little too much.  Playing with this stencil , designed by June Pfaff Daley, will have far less calories than the one I might consume tomorrow.  Here goes!

June Pfaff Daley's Cupcake Sprinkles (S011)

First, using a Gelli Arts plate and a brayer I rolled some acrylic paint over the surface.

As you can see below, I mixed the colors together a bit.

I purchased a hunk of this floor adhesive stuff at Northern Tool & Equipment.  

I think it is for the garage floor.

To me, it looks like a great stamp!  Since there are circular elements in the finer part of the stencil I thought it would be a visually interesting background for the cupcake.

Using several pieces of watercolor paper and a variety of liquid acrylic paint and spray acrylic paint

I applied the paint, pressed the gelli plate surface with the improvised stamp, and pressed the paper onto it.  I did this repeatedly and varied the paint colors slightly, as well as using the tool as a stamp, but I did stay on one side of the color wheel to avoid making "mud".

Here are the papers....

Now, I plan to stencil opaque white paint through the cupcake opening.

I apologize that the images here are flipped sideways.  

I don't like it but I don't know what to do about it.

I wanted this white opaque paint because I am either going to apply another paint color over the surface, or simply use the white to allow the "toppings" to show.

Using the small circular openings I add decoration to the cupcake icing.

I added a few more elements that I will alter a bit later.

sprinkles...

I'm adding marker to the openings on the base.

Now, some Sakura "Souffle" pen marks

Using a cheap set of office supply stencils that I carry around when I travel 

(and I am traveling as I finish this project) I write on the surface

some more dots are added with the Sakura pens.

On this paper I elected to leave the cupcake white and work into the background instead.

Here are my finished pieces.  I like the partial words visible in the background.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you will bounce on over to the other blogs on this hop!

StencilGirl Talk

June Pfaff Daley

Mary Beth Shaw

Paula Phillips-Journal Artista

Kirsten Reed

Marjie Kemper

Mary C. Nasser

Carolyn Dube

Maria McGuire

More Photos From The Long Beach Festival

Feet photo (Top to clockwise):  Kathy Hoover, Yvonne Porcella,

Jamie Fingal, myself

...from higher up

Yvonne Porcella, whose quilt is in the background just beyond her right shoulder (the male figure)

Looking across from our exhibit to the SAQA Seasonal Palette.

I love this exhibition!

An attendee photographs my quilt (center)

The last hurrah for "Amsterdam Alley".  This quilt won first place in the digital category 

at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, 2012.

It will go to its new owner soon.

Images From The International Quilt Festival in Long Beach

Despite my best intentions, I did not write a blog post during the festival.  Here are a few pics from the show:

Judy Coates-Perez helps hang the 

"Exquisite Moment" exhibition.

Her height made her extremely popular on the hanging crew!

In our hotel room I played with a new toy:  Derwent Inktense Blocks

Come back to see more of this piece on 8/9!

Jayne Larson & Pam Kleibaum at the Dinner At Eight Artists' dinner

Pokey Bolton holds the exhibition catalog for Yvonne Porcella

as Yvonne discusses her "exquisite moment".

Pokey and Yvonne.  Love her glasses!!

Spoonology!

(L-R:  Jeannie Palmer Moore, Rachel Parris, and myself)

On the show floor Yvonne chats with Kathy Hoover 

in front of the Exquisite Moment exhibit.

Looking out of our hotel room we have a "herd" of 

these gantry cranes in view.

They look like mechanical giraffes to me.....

Garden Flags

I frequently contemplate the meaning of home in my work.  Often, it manifests itself in the form of nests.  Nests, though a practical element in the life cycle of birds, has a deeper meaning for me.
I decided to make a set of flags about the ideas of safety, nurturing, and security.  Although they were intended for my garden I'm not certain I can bear putting them outside!

In the case of each piece I screened the same bird/nest image on the red silk 

and directly under it onto the canvas.

I screen printed some sale tags and tied them onto the bottom of each piece.

Each flag was sewn onto a length of cotton trim.

Flags are a great way to "work small".  They can be playful, fun, or contain a deeper meaning.  The choice is up to you.  I am making some additional pieces to hang in the garden.  I hope the birds approve!

Here's a sneak peek at a few more....

Stencil Blog Hop today!

Today I'm playing around with a few things to showcase  Andrew Borloz Crossed Rounds & Squares Stencil L159.

All the shapes on this large stencil are great for a wide variety of applications.  I am working on watercolor paper with a variety of paint opacities to build layers.

I placed two pieces of watercolor paper under the stencil and lightly misted

over the surface with acrylic ink

I like the varying degrees of coverage I got.

Since there is still quite a bit of ink sitting on the surface of the stencil,

I placed it over another paper that has several layers of acrylic paint.

You may notice that I used Wendy Aikin's Waterway stencil as part of this design.

Using a paper towel I rubbed the stencil to displace the ink onto the paper underneath.

The result is a faint mark that ghosts the more opaque ones made with the same stencil.

Cool!

Because I like to vary the scale of the dominant shapes on a piece,

I hand-painted partial circles across the surface.

I used a brush and quickly painted several squares on this piece.

Next, I will work back into the larger shapes with a bright opaque yellow.

Thank you for stopping by!  Please visit the other Creative Team members to get more ideas!

Below are links:

StencilGirl Talk

Marjie Kemper

Kirsten Reed

Sami Harding

Corrine Gilman

Janet Joehlin

Linda Kittmer

Carolyn Dube

Paula Phillips

Mary C. Nasser

Maria McGuire