Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry caryl@bryerpatch.com Port Townsend
The design for this quilt began with a photograph I took at a butterfly garden in Victoria BC. I loved the graphic quality of the butterfly, in black, white, and red, against the verdant background. The fabrics are hand painted or are from my Gradations collection for Benartex.
Technique: hand dyed and painted, machine appliquéd, pieced, and quilted
Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry caryl@bryerpatch.com Port Townsend
In 2013 we chartered a boat and spent ten days cruising in the Canadian Gulf islands. One of our favorite ports was Cowichan, BC, where the harbor was dominated by the headquarters of the Wooden Boat Society. The building’s railings cast dramatic shadows in the water beneath. By zooming in I found dramatic images that looked like abstract expressionist paintings.
Gathers and puffs have been used to transform what was intended as a simple swimsuit cover-up. One bodice front and one sleeve feature star gathering, a patterned relief created when small circles of fabric are gathered on a grid. The front band is embellished with fabric gathered in concentric circles and attached so closely that the pinked edges are forced upward.
Technique: star gathering on sleeve and bodice grids, massed ruffled puffs on front band
A friend gifted me with a box of her family member's unfinished, hand pieced quilt blocks from the 1930's. They have been singing and nagging at me to use them for years. Metamorphosis was the inspiration needed to transform them and my husband's high school trumpet sheet music into this quilt.
Barbara Houshmand barbarahoushmand@gmail.com or (mobile) 360.808.5525 Port Angeles
This piece is from an ongoing series of small works. Using the same shapes over and over and keeping the color palette limited helps to define the simple design.
Technique: pieced and quilted
Materials: my hand dyed cotton and old silk drapes which are naturally dyed
Michelle Johnson 928.379.0475 or mj@laughingcloudstudio.com Port Angeles
An outside reflection of the opening process from within. Blossoming but still allowing a partial protective covering to envelop me. Hidden inside are the seeds of inspiration.
Technique: wet felting using a 2D resist
Materials: Merino wool, unspun silk, freshwater pearls and glass beads
Cheri Kopp 206.947.7932 or studio@cherikopp.com Port Townsend
Uniting my cast-off materials art and my quilting, I reimagined Grandmother’s Flower Garden, a traditional quilt pattern, creating 40+ blocks, to date.
I collected, cleaned and stored foil tops from yogurt containers for years until realizing that circles could become hexagons.
Each “block” is titled to reflect it’s distinct identity; these are: Clockwise, How Now?, and Green Is Sexy.
The rainforest's greatest agents of metamorphosis are the nurse logs. Their horizontal trunks form a dense mesh that hosts ferns, fungi, lichens, mosses, insects, spiders, tree seedlings, and a variety of vertebrates. Nurse logs are both the larder and the highways upon which the forest depends.
Technique: machine piecing, machine quilting, hand quilting, hand beading
Materials: cotton fabrics, cotton batting, thread, buttons, beads, and thrums
There's no greater agent of planetary metamorphosis than the rifts in the earth's crust, deep under the ocean. This quilt calls to mind a rift where magma has just breached the crust and is now about to emerge onto the ocean floor.
Technique: machine piecing, machine quilting, hand stitching
Life is full of twists and turns. Sometimes we think we are following a path, or we just let life unfold. There are always surprises. In this piece I adorned a doubleweave piece and attempted to control the differential shrinkage of layers through stitching, but I knew there would be some unexpected results.
There are so many layers in the world around us - seen and unseen, experienced and understood by each of us in unique ways. In this doubleweave piece, I explored the interaction of layers. I wove two layers, alternating shrinking and non-shrinking yarns. After washing, agitating, and drying, I continued to work with the piece to expose some of the layers.
I admired a swarm of fruit flies over a neglected apple pie and stated thinking about our relationship to food. I also started thinking about apples and what they represent. The rest is up to you.
Technique: piecing, painting and drawing on fabric, hand and free-motion embroidery
Materials: hand dyed and commercial fabric, acrylic paint,embroidery thread, fusible web, colored pencil