journal - Susie Monday

Susie Monday

Artist, maker, teacher, author, head cook and bottlewasher.

The art I make is the result of a life-long love of pattern, texture and color. How I teach is a skill honed by experience (I started teaching creative arts to younger kids when I was 12). After earning a B.A. in Studio Arts from Trinity University, I helped lead an internationally recognized educational foundation, designed curriculum exhibits for schools and other institutions, wrote and edited for a major daily newspaper, opened the San Antonio Children's Museum and then, a dozen years ago, took the scary but essential (for me) leap to become a fulltime artist and art teacher.

About This Blog

This weblog is about the maker's life. The teacher's path. The stitching and dyeing and printing of the craft of art cloth and art quilt. The stumbling around and the soaring, the way the words and the pictures come together. Poetry on the page and in the piecing of bright scraps together. The inner work and the outer journeys to and from. Practicalities and flights of fancy and fearful grandeur, trivial pursuits and tactile amusements. Expect new postings two or three times a week, unless you hear otherwise.

To reach me, leave a comment after a post, OR email me at susiemonday@gmail.com

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Entries in piecing (1)

Saturday

Feb112012

Therapy Strips, Thanks to Rayna

Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 09:45AM

Rayna Gillman's new(ish) book, Create your own Free-Form Quilts, has inspired me to try my very first all-pieced art quilt. Yay, Rayna. For an art quilter who has come to textile work from the art not the quilt world, this is a big and scary step for me.

But, thanks to Rayna, I now know: The 1/4" seam rule is not so set in stone. Sometimes crooked is good. A piece is a piece is a piece and it can always be cut and pieced again.

That's just the start. Here are my "therapy strips" waiting to become something else. I also actually have a nice set of pomegranite "blocks" put together and am trying to decide if they are done or need to become my own version of a 9-patch. (And, they are very therapeutic, just the thing for me to do when I need studio time, but don't know exactly what to work on next -- or ever again).