Visions Art Museum Challenge Met

From the Visions Art Museum website:

The mission of Visions Art Museum is to create an international community of quilt and textile artists, collectors and the public through exhibitions, education, and engaging programs that increase the appreciation of quilts, textiles and fiber as fine art…

Visions Art Museum: Contemporary Quilts + Textiles is a program of Quilt San Diego, a non-profit arts organization founded in 1985 to promote contemporary quilt making as fine art.

It sounds pretty good, but this is what drew me in and caused me to part with hard-earned dollars for the membership fee: exhibition opportunities!

Visions Museum offers frequent members’ challenges, themed online exhibits, and juried exhibitions—in other words, exactly what I spend a lot of time looking for.

The challenge pieces are small, giving quilters the chance to show their work without spending weeks on a project. The quilts are all for sale, with half of the sale price going to the museum, and half to the artist. Now that is a deal.

The current members’ challenge was to make a 10″ wide x 14″ tall quilt with an abstract theme. Over 60 quilters answered the call, and our quilts are on display (and for sale) at the museum from April 18 – July 5, 2015.

Mine is called Sunshine through Fog, and you can find a teeny-tiny photo of it on the Visions website here.

Sunshine through Fog is pieced from fabric knitted on my Ultimate Sweater Machine. I like to shade colors of yarn as I knit, like the black-gray-white shading for this piece. This is what the fabric looked like after blocking. There’s a lot of yellow, because more small quilts with a similar look are on the drawing board.

This photo shows the quilt top pieced and pinned to batting and backing, ready to quilt. But wait… I discovered recently that a layer of tulle holds the unruly cut edges of the knitting in place. After consulting with a long-time associate (my teenage daughter, Eva), I added a layer of silvery-white tulle to the top, cutting out the spaces over the yellow areas.

The next members’ challenge for me is “Curves,” which opens at the museum in October.