Lawler - Skydyes

Editor: Annie Nelson

Technical Editor: Lynn Koolish

Book Design: Rose Sheifer

Cover Design: Christina Jarumay

Graphic Illustrations: Lynn Koolish

Photography: Jack McConnell and McConnell McNamara, Wethersfield, Connecticut, unless otherwise noted.

Photos on : Bruce R. Wright

In Gratitude

I must tell you that I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this book and am sincerely grateful to Todd Hensley of C&T Publishing for the opportunity to see it in print. Many thanks also go to my editor, Annie Nelson, and to Production Director Diane Pedersen, who were always enthusiastic and encouraging. It was great to work with all of you.

I owe the beauty of this book mostly to the enormous talent of my friend and photographer Jack McConnell of McConnell McNamara, Wethersfield, Connecticut. Thanks, Jack, for your patience, expertise, skill, creativity, and to you and Paula both for making our shoots fun as well.

I also wish to thank Judy Smith-Kressley for photographing many of the quilts featured in the following pages. It was a pleasure to know I could entrust these quilts to you.

To each of the artists who so generously and graciously shared their work for inclusion in this book, I am truly grateful.

Since I have this opportunity, it gives me great pleasure to publicly acknowledge a few other people who have been important to me along the road Ive travelled...

Thanks first are due to my old friend Ann Luby, whose meticulous and unflinching care in heatsetting and pressing literally thousands of yards of Skydyes fabric over the years is, and will forever be, unequaled. Where would we be without you?

I am especially grateful to Michael James and Judi Warren for their passionate and enduring contributions to the aesthetic development of quiltmakingand for sharing it all!

Margy Brehmer, thank you, my friend and mentor. You have, with your grace and humor, through your poetry, and in person, constantly been my lamp, lighting the path ahead.

My thanks go to Jean Thibodeau and Pam Hardiman for their courage and vision in providing New England quilters with the vital, inspiring, and out-of-the-ordinary Double T Quilt Shop of Springfield, Massachusetts, since 1978. I bought my first bottles of fabric paint from them!

I will be forever grateful to the early Quilters Connection group in the Boston area which included Nancy Halpern, Sue Turbak, Ruth McDowell, Rhoda Cohen, and so many others who influenced and excited us as new quilters in the 70s and 80s and continue to do so today.

I am especially indebted to Jean Ray Laury for writing The Creative Womans Getting-It-All-Together-At-Home Handbook at a time when Iand thousands of othersneeded to hear what she generously and graciously presented.

Thanks also are due to the tireless organizers of quilt symposia and shows who give us all a place to come together, to learn, to excel, and to simply enjoy each others company.

My good and dear friends, Holly Becket, Ed and Marlene Mayes, Abbie Hodges, Barbara Wysocki, and Judy Robbins, thank you.

There is no way to thank, personally, each of you, students and customers who, through many years, have encouraged and supported my work. Each picture you send of finished projects using fabric I have painted, each comment about how a piece of fabric inspires you, has touched me and given me renewed energy.

Thank you all.

Dedication

I dedicate this book and the present culmination of many years of work to my loving and nourishing family.

First, to my cherished lifelong partner and husband, Dan, who has provided me with a sheltered port from which to sail.

Also to our three grown daughters, Mary, Terry, and Kate, who have made the voyage rich with waves of laughter amid all kinds of weather.

Last, to my beautiful mother, Mary Kirk Doyle Carson, whose indefatigable optimism during her 93 years of life has had a deep and lasting influence on all that I am.

I will always be profoundly grateful.

Detail of Sails

There are really only two things you need to remember to successfully complete the paintings in this book, and you probably learned these by the first grade:

64 crayons are more fun than 8

and

Recess is the best part of the day!

Neither has to do with that unfortunate word, talent, or, for that matter, your experience as a painter. What is required is that you simply suspend any desire for total control, accept a playful attitude toward your work, and allow a sense of awe to be your daily companion. You probably already recognize the signs: the clock becomes irrelevant, and a span of fifty lifetimes doesnt seem long enough to pursue all the ideas that come to mind.

This book is intended for beginning fabric painters and those who have already dabbled with paints on fabric. It is meant for those who dont want to limit themselves to current trends of color choices available commercially. This book is by no means the last word on the subject; it is simply encouragement and instruction to try my style of painting. It is also my hope you will have as much fun as I do when creating your own fabrics. Certainly, I understand your desire to learn to mix colors and apply paint; that will come with hands-on practice. Be assured that the more time you spend painting, the more you will learn. That cannot help happening. What is far more important, however, is your involvement in the processthe enjoyable pursuit of color and paint, the point at which fifty lifetimes really can exist in one.

By the early 1980s, I had made quilts for over ten years. We quiltmakers who had ventured into abstract and realistic landscape quilts found ourselves desperate for good sky fabric. Using the backs of blue and white flower prints or bleaching streaks in solid blue, we hoped that, from a distance, these fabrics would read as sky. A few blue tie-dyes emerged from a major fabric company only to be discontinued within six months. But this was enough to make me realize that I could create my own skies. At first I dyed white cotton but soon discovered fabric paints. Using paints instead of dyes gave me greater freedom. Here I found no heavy pots, no toxic worries, no measuring or fussjust the pure enjoyment of color on fabric.

What is required is that you simply suspend any desire for total control, accept a playful attitude toward your work, and allow a sense of awe to be your daily companion.

Learn from many different sources. Let the experiences and the instructions of others filter through you until little particles here and there are caught and merge into something that feels just right for you. There are those who intentionally, and unintentionally, have much to teach us. Let me tell you of an experience.

In the mid-70s I was working part-time in a small fabric store. I had been making quilts for about six years, and teaching quiltmaking to 35 students a semester through an adult education class for about four years. Obviously, my students and I were learning together.