The Long Beach International Quilt Festival starts this Friday, July 27th at the Long Beach Convention Center. It runs through Sunday, July 29th. It is a wonderful show with many beautiful quilt exhibits and vendors.

 The "Black and White Desert" Art Quilt I have been showing on this blog will be part of a Quilts on the Wall exhibit debuting at the Long Beach show. The exhibit is called "Black and White with a Twist", and features 27 pieces using a primarily black and white palette. It is a dramatic looking collection and I hope you have a chance to see it. The postcard front and back for the exhibit are shown here.

I will be at the show working the Quilts on the Wall table on Friday from 10 - 12, and the SAQA table from 2- 4 that same day. If you are there please stop by and say hello. I would love to see you.

Black and White Desert Final

Here is a detail showing some of the quilting stitches and beading on the Black and White desert quilt. And my little road runner, of course.

Here is a detail of one of the foreground plants. You can see some of the stitching and the rick rack I added for more variation.

And here is the end product. It will be at the Long Beach International Quilt Festival this weekend. Look for the Quilts on the Wall "Black and White with a Twist" exhibit. I will be there quite a bit, so stop by and say "hello"!

Black and White Foreground Features

 Here are some more photos of the Black and White Desert piece when it was in progress.

These are the barrel cacti that I made from white corduroy. I have used a Frixion pen to mark the quilting stitching lines I will put in. I put a thin piece of batt behind the cacti to make them less see through and add some depth.

Here are the other cacti/plants during construction:

For this plant I placed black and white striped fabric over a solid white background piece. It gave the

 variation that I was looking for.

This is another cactus plant. I made it using a variety of prints layered together. These pieces were secured to the background with free motion quilting stitches. Going around each of these pieces was certainly not easy. I had to keep checking for areas that I had missed since they overlapped each other.

Showing Variation with Black and White

 I'm still writing about how I made my Black and White Desert piece. I show the "value" plan on the left next to the original sketch. As I said previously, I will use different black and white prints to give value change, and solids with different textures and sheens to give more variation.  This is important when your color palette is so limited.

Below is the background of the piece. The sky was made from a silky white fabric and the large hills in the back are black velvet. The velvet does a great job giving weight and the feeling of a large massive hill in the background.

All the prints are black and white cottons. The large dark hill on the right front is a heavy upholstery fabric with a lot of texture. This gives more interest when you are looking at the piece closely. The small black area closest to the front is a black silky fabric.   Not shown here are the barrel cacti that I put on the front. For those I used white corduroy. Quilting is not just about cotton prints anymore!

Black and White with a Twist

I

 This is a photo of an art quilt I made for the  Quilts on the Wall "Black and White with a Twist" exhibit for the Long Beach International Quilt Festival in July. The exhibit required the use of 90% black and white fabrics with 10% of another color.

I am proud to say it has been juried into the Long Beach exhibit. It is shown here hanging against my black back drop.  

I started this piece by making a sketch and then enlarging it to the finished size.  The full size drawing is used to make pattern pieces for the elements in the art quilt.

The photo above shows the value/color plan used for the quilt. Since the colors were primarily black and white it really is more of a texture plan. I used a variety of different black and white prints as well as different types of solid fabrics to give variation to the background. My next entry will show more of the background fabrics and steps used to create this piece.

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July everyone! Take a minute ot think about the courage it took to declare independence from one of the world's most powerful countries, and how that courage changed the world. Enjoy your day!