Where Are They Now? Karen Rips

I would say that the nine years since I was invited to join Twelve by Twelve have been more artistically rewarding than I could ever have imagined. Through the experimental pieces I made with the group challenges, I have found the art I love to make and have been very successful in exhibiting my work around the country. My collaboration with Paula Chung in A View Within is currently on exhibition at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts, and Schmidt Art Center.  A new piece from my 3-D series on Loss will also be in this year's World of Threads in Oakville, Canada. My continuing friendships with the other Twelves are very important to me.

Losing Touch © Karen Rips

PS: Brenda has put up this post for me as I am currently travelling in Iceland and the Faroe Islands with irregular internet access:

SAQA Benefit Auction 2014: Dream Collection

The annual benefit auction is the signature fundraising event for Studio Art Quilt Associates. Your purchases help increase the recognition for art quilts and the artists who make them while supporting SAQA’s exhibitions, publications, and education outreach. The 2014 SAQA Benefit Auction is coming up in September and Dream Collections are starting to appear online.  The dream collection set out below is comprised of works donated by six of the Twelves that are up for auction:
    Nightfall: Deborah Boschert             Sky Blue Pink: Gerrie Congdon            Undecided:  Karen Rips                   The Visitor:  Terri Stegmiller                    Eye of the Crow: Terry Grant                   Neptune's Necklace#1:Brenda Smith

Talking of SAQA, congratulations to Helen! Her work Graffiti 1 was juried into the “SAQA exhibition Wide Horizons IV that will premiere at the Carrefour Européen du Patchwork/European Patchwork Meeting  in Alsace, France:18-21 September 2014.  Don't forget, all 144 works from the Colorplay Series will also be on exhibition at this event.

Graffiti 1:  Helen Conway

Many of the Twelves enjoy the educational, networking, mentoring and exhibition opportunities offered by Studio Art Quilt Associates. If you’ve been thinking about joining SAQA, add the discount code “BGS” to the application form and you will receive a 10% discount on the membership fee.

SAQA Benefit Auction 2013 at the International Quilt Festival

The 2013 SAQA Benefit Auction continues with the final tranche open for in-person bidding at the International Quilt Festival, Houston in Houston from 28 October to 3 November (with online bidding available on 28 and 29 October) . This is a great opportunity to purchase quality textile art and support SAQA’s exhibition programs. You can view the quilts in this tranche at page a and  page b of the SAQA website including these works donated by some of the Twelves in their distinctive styles.

Deborah's work Rocks, Rivers and Rooftops incorporates many of her favorite motifs and techniques: the houses, the hand embroidery, handwriting as surface design, a painted stenciled twig and the arch over the top of the suggested landscape.  You can read the surprising back story  to this piece on Deborah's blog and learn some of these techniques yourself in Deborah's new online workshop called Branches, Buds and Blossoms Fabric Collage.

In her work Awareness, Karen stitched a piece of fabric with wool felt underneath to shrink it up for texture.  After bleaching, she overdyed it a very pale blue, which took away the cream color.  Raised circles, created with buttons, adds extra interest.

Terri's Kitty Rides Back features a portait and two kitties in stencilled fabrics made from her very own stencil designs.

If you happen to be attending the International Quilt Festival, Houston in person, be sure to check out the following exhibits that also features works by some of the Twelves:

• An Exquisite Moment  features works by Deborah Boschert, Gerrie Congdon, Diane Perin Hock and Karen Rips.  There is also An Exquisite Moment Catalogue available for sale;
•  Tactile Architecture and What's for Dinner special exhibits feature works by Deborah Boschert..

Twelve by Twelve Bingo !

Today is an momentous day in Twelve by Twelve history.  Let the record show that on 19 October 2013 (New Zealand time), Karen completed a real life game of Twelve by Twelve in that she is the first Twelve to have met every other member of the group.  BINGO!

For her part, Kirsty doubled her Twelve count in just one day!  Here is the smiling duo in Christchurch, New Zealand:

Just this week, Kirsty relocated from Townsville, Australia to Christchurch to join her husband Peter who is working on earthquake reconstruction projects.   The timing was serendipitous as Karen and her husband Ted are currently exploring New Zealand.  Both Kirsty and Karen have limited internet access but, via Facebook, Kirsty reports:

We have had the BEST day with Karen and Ted! I adore them both. They are funny, loving and gracious.

We're feeling the love. Congratulations on making Twelve by Twelve history!

PS:  If you look carefully, you can see Peter and Ted (with the cap) reflected in the background of the photo.

At the Art Gallery

As part of our Saturday walkabout, we popped into the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Karen and Ted returned a couple of days later and look what they discovered in the gallery book store!

Our book Twelve by Twelve: The International Art Quilt Challenge is available from a range of suppliers including Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Check out your favourite store.

2x12 in Sydney

 

A sparkling spring Sydney day. How wonderful to be able to show Karen and Ted a little of the city, or a lot.  (They might have sore feet after the walking tour through the city, the Botanic Gardens, the Rocks and the Harbour Bridge and back to the hotel.). Thank you for coming to visit.  Come back soon!

Quilt National

I'm just back from Athens Ohio and Quilt National which you can read about on my blog http://www.fiberartmusings.blogspot.com

While there I was asked to participate on a panel discussion about how we came to this point in our artistic lives to enter Quilt National, and I want to quote a few things I said in my talk

"Backtracking for a moment, in 2007 I was asked to join an online group called Twelve by Twelve, The International Art Quilt Challenge , started by Diane Perin Hock."

 "Twelve by Twelve was one of those aha moments in my life.  I was able to focus on a small piece of work, try out new techniques, and even in a last minute panic, experiment with something purely on instinct."

"...the group was supportive in every way, like a nurturing mother.  I think that's just what I needed at the time to build confidence in my artwork"

So thank you Twelves, for helping me to this point in my artistic career.

Twelve Meet-up in San Diego and Del Was There.

Mr C and I are in Southern California, escaping gray skies and rain in Portland. Today was the last day of the Quilt Visions exhibit at the Visions Art Museum. We arranged to meet Karen and some of her friends and Del, who gave us a most wonderful docent tour of this fabulous exhibit. Then we went out to lunch and much chatter about this and that and art quilts. Thank you, Del.

2012 Series by Karen

Congratulations to Karen whose textile work, High Water Mark, was chosen from over 851 entries for Quilt National 2013, the eighteenth international juried competition for new innovative quilts, on display May 24 – September 2, 2013 at the Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio (USA).

Knowing this might be our last challenge, I wanted to make something that represented my thoughts on this wonderful group.  When Terri came up with Sweet, I had to think for a long time how to work that out.  Joann http://jsuley.blogspot.com came to the rescue when she mentioned referring to something she likes as "sweet", which is what my kids say too.
I like the symbolism of this piece.  I started with a large painted circle, which I made on three separate pieces of fabric, then pieced them together.  I added the hand stitched circle so it's hard to see the paint underneath.  After that the piece came together really quickly. The yellow strip on the right side was added after I finished and bound the piece and discovered it was 11 x 20.  I tried out the greys, and a dark red, but yellow seemed to work best.  Actually, not cutting it off in the first place would have worked best.
We are twelve women who have been able to join together to create a wonderful group experience yet maintain our individuality.  My art has improved considerably since joining this group. I've pushed myself way outside my original box and for that I'm eternally grateful.

Rush Job

I should never try to rush through anything.  It always comes back to haunt me, and takes me twice as long to finish what I wanted to rush through.

I ran through a few medical ideas for Sweet, but couldn't come up with anything I wanted to work on.  Then I was reading Joann's blog here http://jsuley.blogspot.com/2012/10/breakfast-pepper.html, and thought about all the times my kids say sweet when they like something.  I came up with an idea quickly after that, and since I'm going on vacation soon, I wanted to finish it before I left.  It turned out really nice until I cut it down to size, sewed that backing on, and realized it was 11 x 20. I got that sinking feeling you get when you really mess up and started scrambling for a solution.

Top left is the edge with the backing on.  I had to remove the backing, then dug thru the trash to find the edge I had cut off. For some reason I thought if I just sew it back on, no one will notice.
Well, I notice, and I'm sure you do too. Sigh. It took me a few days, but I did come up with a solution that works.  But your not going to see it until December 12th.

Double XY

If you read my last blog post, you can see these two pieces are night and day.  I'm back in my comfort zone with this piece.  I used up about 4 weeks on the other quilt, and even as I was finishing it I had started thinking about this.  Something I read about triggered the idea of genes, and I started thinking about the many instances of maverick ( or aberrant ) genes I have seen in my nursing career.  The double XY though is not something you would pickup in an infant. It usually shows up in teenagers, if at all.

Double XY, also called Klinefelter's syndrome, or 47, is a condition where the person has an extra X chromosome. Females are born with two X chromosomes, males are XY, so this syndrome affects males.  For more information, I can refer you to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter's_syndrome.

I worked with someone with this condition, and he ended up having a sex change operation because he always felt female, and she was so much happier after the surgery.  I wonder how many males are out there not even knowing they have this, wondering what's wrong with them.

I made this piece with black cotton that discharged to white, and wool felt for the batting. I added some hand stitched letters at the bottom.  I would like to go back to this idea as I think it would make an interesting series.

My Maverick Failure

I have a hard time blogging about what didn't work, I don't even like looking at the picture!  Whenever I hear our new challenge,  I usually spend a few days thinking about the possibilities.  I don't like to wait too long because I worry I'll be stuck near the deadline and not be able to come up with anything.  My brain was set on a maverick being a person, not a moment or a thing, despite discussions to the contrary.  I don't usually interpret people in my work, for whatever reason, I'm not comfortable with it.  I should have listened to myself on this one.

My idea was to think of someone I thought of as maverick, and Muhammed Ali came to mind pretty quickly.  The choices he has made through out his life have gone against society's choices for him, and he has stood strong for what he believes in and taken the punishment for it.  Once I settled on Muhammed Ali, I had to decide how to get my ideas across in an abstract way.  This is where I muddled it up.  I thought about his Parkinson's and how tortured he looked at the Olympics and wanted to portray this.  I now think that was a mistake because the Parkinson's is not who he is, it's just something he's got.  I went ahead and made the outside black and blue fabric, using wool felt in the batting to shrink it, trying to portray the gray matter in the brain.  This was ok, but I think I was worried people wouldn't know I was portraying a person, or who it was, so I thought I'd be clever by adding his eyes in a sheer fabric. Big mistake. I liked it at the time I was putting it together, but that didn't have staying power. So I set out to "fix" it, which is usually a mistake. The orange fabric is sheer also, and I stitched on it thinking you could see the remainder of the face subtlety, but it just kept getting worse.  I finally added cheesecloth because doesn't cheesecloth hide a lot of mistakes and tie the whole thing together?  Yuk.
So, Del, I think you were the one who asked us to talk more about our process.  I don't usually make sketches, I usually just think out the whole piece in my brain before I start, making changes as I go along.  I'm usually pretty successful with this method, but once in a while, it just doesn't work out.
In the mean time, I went back to the suggestions Brenda and Terry sent me about medical mavericks and came up with something I like a lot, and is true to my style of work. You will see it October 1st.

Maverick Moments

I don't ever remember giving the word maverick much thought until Brenda introduced it as our next theme.  When I think about it the only thing that comes to my mind is a person, although Carol Soderlund pointed out to me the original meaning was in rancher terms, where a maverick is a renegade bull.
When Terry and her husband Ray were here a few weeks ago, we got into a discussion of what comes to mind when you say a person is "a maverick", and it was easy to come up with who is not a maverick, for instance, being a genius, or a great athlete, or creative in some way does not qualify you.  One of the definitions I found for the word is dissenter, someone who goes their own way and isn't influenced by others opinions.  It doesn't have to be someone who's done good, it could be just as easily a troublemaker, in fact I'm pretty sure a lot of mavericks are also labeled troublemakers.
As more wine was being consumed, we moved into more abstract ideas.  Is there such a thing as a "maverick moment"?  I was pretty sure I'd heard this phrase before but when I googled it I couldn't find anything.  I mentioned this to a few people at the quilt show and at Carol's class the next week, and before you know it we were having maverick moments several times a day!  The only thing google had listed in it's first four pages for maverick moment was this

Up at Half Moon Bay in northern CA, there are some very large waves, which of course gets some daredevils out for a Maverick Wave contest each year.
I'm pretty sure I've settled on a person I think of as maverick, now I have to decide how to capture that maverickness.

2012 SAQA Benefit Auction

Congratulations to Helen . Her distinctive African figures feature on the promotional materials for the forthcoming Studio Art Quilts Associates 2012 Benefit auction.  Bidding begins on 10 September and Helen, Terri and Karen have works in the first tranche (pieces by other Twelves follow).  In the meantime, check out the "Dream Collections".

More Photos from Long Beach

It took most of the day, but we finally got the 3 twelves with Del for a photo in front of our exhibit. We look quite happy and with good reason. Our exhibit was one of the most popular at the show, once again.

We drove out to the harbor and met Del's friends, Sherry and Jim, who took us on a lovely boat ride in the harbor on their Duffy boat. Here is the boat. It was a very comfy ride and was very quiet as it is electric. 

This is the view over the bow of the Duffy boat.

After cruising the harbor and the canals of Naples, we stopped at the Yacht Club for dinner. Del's birthday is Sept 1, but since she is always out of town, Sherry and Jim had a cake to celebrate tonight. I love this photo of her and it is much more Del than the photo I posted last night. 

Achilles' Heel

I guess it's no surprise I decided on a body part for this challenge, and Achilles' Heel sort of "jumped out"  :) at me.   Greek mythology tells the tale that Thetis was foretold while Achilles was a baby,
he would someday die in battle. To prevent this, Thetis dipped him in the River Styx which was supposed to make him invincible.  Thetis, unfortunately, did not notice the water hadn't washed over the heel she was holding, and later, in battle, the great warrior Achilles was shot in the heel with a poison arrow and died.

To make this piece, I wanted to try a using sheers in layers.  I was only moderately successful at this because I ended up with two layers instead of the three I had wanted.  They are stitched loosely at the top with about an inch of batting in between so the piece kind of moves.

I started with some MRI images of the heel which showed to progression of tendons and bones from one side to the other. The under layer is a piece of black organza. I traced the image I wanted with wax, then used Decolorant to get rid of most of the black.  This turned out great, very mottled looking.

For the top, I used white organza and hand stitched another image of the heel in red thread.  Then I applied some gold foiling, avoiding the heel.  Photographing this not easy with all the gold and sheers, so I can say with all honesty, it looks better in person.

Myth making

My 12 x 20 piece for the myth theme is well underway, but I'm at a decision making point right now that I'm not very happy with.

I wanted to try layering three sheers over each other with the hopes that each one would influence the other. Brilliant right?  In theory only.  I am using silk organza from Exotic silk because it's very sheer, and I think it has the best possibility of working in this method.

I'm down to two layers now, hoping something will show up from the bottom piece.
I'm taking a class with Carol Soderlund this fall at Coupeville, Washington called Layers Upon Layers. Not soon enough for this piece, but I haven't given up yet.

Arrhythmia

I knew when I heard the theme "Maps" I would some how be able to tie it into my explorations of the body.  I considered brain mapping, but I wasn't crazy about the images I saw, so I went with cardiac mapping.  Cardiac Mapping is preformed by inserting catheters into the heart and moving them around to different locations to identify where an arrhythmia starts. Once the doctors have identified the area, they zap it (technical term is ablation), to destroy the aberrant tissue.

I looked at several pictures on line to get an idea of the images the doctors see, and this finished piece is a combination of what I saw, and what I imagined.  As you can see, I'm not the best at hand stitching the rounded edges, I ripped them out several times but for some reason I couldn't make them look the way I wanted them to.  I will say I'm really good at stitching arrhythmias.

The background orange started out as ProChem tangerine, but it was really screaming at me, so I overdyed it with dusty purple, which toned it down a bit. The machine stitching was all done on my Sweet Sixteen which moved along really quickly so I was able to spend a lot more time ripping out and restitching the hand work.  I was going to make a series with this, and I still may, but I've only completed one other, which is on my blog /http://www.fiberartmusings.blogspot.com/.

Philadelphia

Karen and I attended the Studio Art Quilt Associates conference in Philadelphia last weekend. It's a good thing we snapped this picture because we only ran into each other briefly at a few of the galleries. Not much time to chat... so much art to absorb!

But it was so great to see her. A big hug is such a lovely reminder of the wonderful connections we "twelves" have created over the last several years of working together.

Kristin was in Philly too -- or at least her art work.

This is her War Sucks quilt in the Art Quilt Elements exhibit.