2012 Whisper Quilts Revealed

The Whisper Challenge for our Northern California/Nevada SAQA group had their big reveal meeting of the finished quilts today. It’s always fun to see the directions the various participants went in. You can see all of the quilts on our regions blog.

Here is the starting photo (By Deb Cashatt) that was used for our latest SAQA Whisper Challenge. It shows a busy street corner in Hong Kong. The arched structure is a pedestrian walkway above the street.


I wasn’t sure I would like doing an architectural piece, but I ended up liking how it turned out. With so much going on in the quilt, I needed to decide which details I would focus on and which I would edit out. I ended up piecing together of vertical rectangles to suggest a city, and then I painted the arches on top.

See what others have been up to this week on Nina Marie's Off the Wall Friday. 

Whisper Challenge

Have I really not posted since December? I was busy in Spring teaching an Excel class which I hadn't taught before. Went on a week and a half trip to Orlando and Disney World right after school let out. This summer I've been busy with a major garden project in the front yard. I did manage to get a quilt done last month, although I can't show more than a preview since it's a challenge project which can't be revealed yet.

It’s Whisper Challenge time again. Here is a small detail of how I began. The top is pieced together with overlapping edges held together with zigzag stitching. I drew the main design lines directly on the top with a permanent fabric marker. They are hardly visible now after I have added all of the layers of paint and quilting. The completed quilt won’t be revealed until after the challenge is complete in February 2013.

The 2011Whisper Challenge can now be viewed on the SAQA regional blog. My quilt “Figs for a Crow” is the seventh quilt in Group 5.

I never showed the finished quilt from the 2010 Whisper Challenge, although I showed a preview a couple years ago. I don’t think there is a slide show available of the whole challenge, but I do have a few photos from the beginning.

Here is the photo, which I started from. A small crab on a rocky beach.

Here it is my finished quilt. I zoomed in on the little crab, brightened the color scheme up, and added a few barnacles.

I love what Deb Cashatt came up with next. She manipulated the photo of my quilt in Photoshop, and came up with something totally unique.

Whisper Challenge Slide Show

All of the quilts from the 2009 Whisper Challenge can now be viewed on the blog for The Northern California & Nevada Region of SAQA:
http://saqa-norcal.blogspot.com/2010/04/2009-whisper-challenge.html

It's good to be able to see all of the quilts together.

Whisper Quilts Revealed

I went to the regional SAQA meeting Saturday in Elk Grove. The main feature was the revealing of the Whisper Quilt Challenge. I forgot to hand my camera over to someone when I was holding up the group of quilts I was in, but managed to get this snapshot of the quilts stacked on the table afterwards. I will talk a bit about the quilts shown here. I believe better photos of all of the quilts will soon be up on our SAQA blog. I will link there when they are up.

Four different groups all started with the same photo of a desert garden, and all went in four different directions.

Marjorie Johnson’s quilt is shown on the top of the stack. You can see her full quilt on her website. She says she had a hard time trying to find cactus fabrics to add to her collaged desert landscape. And then she added some animals to put life into the quilt.

Cynthia Long did a value study of Marjorie’s quilt, and discharged a piece of silk to replicate the pattern of values she saw. She then added lots of wonderful detail with additional paint (or dye maybe?) and lots of wonderful hand stitching.

Carol Larson focused on some painted and stitched details from Cynthia’s quilt, and made it the main focus of her own quilt. She worked in similar colors as Cynthia. Just a hint of the original landscape is showing in the green hill-like shape at the bottom of her quilt.

Liz Berg did away altogether with the landscape idea. She continued with Carol’s circle motif, and added some long curvy shapes. Her full quilt is shown on her blog at the bottom of this post.

My first thought about Liz’s quilt was of sea kelp and bubbles, but I didn’t wasn’t real interested in doing kelp, and waited a couple of days to see if any other ideas would emerge. The colors and shapes in Liz’s quilt reminded me of a piece of fabric I had with random circles printed across it. And then the fabric reminded me of a lone allium plant with two straggly leaves growing down the street. I pulled out lots of coordinating polka dot prints, and added a drift of circles behind the main flower. Liz’s long curvy shapes became the stem and leaves of my allium.

Loose Plans for a Bed Quilt

At the CQFA meeting last weekend, we had a time scheduled to work on individual projects. A few years ago, I started a bed quilt with a very loose plan sketched out on the computer, and had made about 60 blocks. I grabbed it to work on at the meeting, since I didn’t have any newer projects in progress. I made a handful of blocks on Saturday, and made another few today. It’s a great project to play with color and value, and doesn’t require any planning. I plan to get out my bag of green and orange strips and small scraps occasionally and make a few more squares. After I have made about a hundred more, I will see how I can fit them together. I figure in about 20 years, maybe I will have a quilt to show.

I also got the sleeve put on my “Whisper Challenge” quilt today, and now I have a bright new quilt hanging above my sewing machine. Still can’t show the full quilt yet for a few months. Maybe if I get ambitious, I will make a hanging slat which is the right size.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, & Whisper Quilts

I am in a Whisper Quilt challenge with SAQA. We are divided into groups of ten. The first person received a photograph, and was required to create a quilt inspired by the photo. The second person gets to see the first quilt (but not the photo) and makes a quilt inspired by it. The third person gets to see the second quilt… and so on. It’s a bit like playing “telephone” where something is whispered from person to person, and by the time it gets to the last person, the message is completely changed. I got to see the results from the last Whisper Challenge (this link loads slow, but it’s worth the wait). Three groups went in completely different directions, and all of the quilts were really wonderful.

I am creating a quilt based on what Liz Berg has done. I had an immediate first impression of her quilt, and my family had similar thoughts. But, I put that idea away to see if it might lead me in other directions. Then I remembered a piece of fabric which seemed to relate to Liz’s quilt, and the fabric lead me in a new direction, and everything seemed to fall into place…until I got it all pinned together and it just didn’t seem right. The separate pieces weren’t relating to each other. Time to put it away for a day and come back to it later.

I went to San Francisco the next day to the SFMOMA to see the “Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams” exhibit. The exhibit showed works by both artists and compared their art. I hadn’t known that they were friends, or imagined that their work could have any similarities. Actually, I knew little about the work of Ansel Adams beyond a dozen or so of his most well known photos. I now have a better appreciation of his work after seeing the exhibit. I enjoyed seeing O’Keeffe’s paintings up close. I began noticing areas in her paintings how a shape or a line might be clearly defined in one area, and then fade into obscurity. I wondered if adding some obscurity might make my quilt better.

The following day, I got out my fabric paints. I darkened the background in part of the quilt to lower the contrast between it and the foreground. I added some visual texture to the same area which seemed to relate to the rest of the quilt. It’s been rescued from the “what was I thinking stack,” and now it’s one of my favorite quilts.

Sorry, I can’t show pictures. It must remain Top Secret until the last people have finished their quilts, and we are allowed to reveal them to the world. I will be taking it to my small CQFA group this weekend to share. There are two other Whisper Challenge participants in that group, but one has finished hers, and one said she won’t be there this weekend, so I think it will be safe to whisper a few secrets in the small group. The last person is scheduled to finish in December, so look for pictures in 2010.