Kaffe Fassett Exhibit at IQA Houston 2013

the hey everyone we're at fall market 2013 and I bumped into Kaif Fassett and I said cave can we get an interview and he said sure so thank you you're very welcome I mean it's lovely do see you here oh I'll just hold that in my heart anyways cave has a special exhibit here and it's I mean we we like the same quilts the best and I want I want to start with this one tell us about the special exhibit right well the exhibit is for this book I've done called shots and stripes so it's all my hand-woven Indian fabrics that were celebrating for the first time but I thought it was just an interesting idea for Liza and I to come together my partner in crime to create just pools of color and wonderful stripes so that the stripe becomes our most important theme in well way back in the day when Liza was on simply quilts I I begged off of her your Cotton's and they were the stripes I mean I've never seen it before and I'm so thrilled that you can still get them today and honestly they're getting better and better yeah yeah it is exciting this one is inspired by the sonne family and I wanted to do a tribute to them because they used that wonderful zigzag all the time in all of their work and it was wonderful to be able to make a total celebration with the stripes acting as part of that zigzag pattern well they're doing a lot of the work I mean really guys make it so it's just one simple diamond just repeated and repeated um and and of course it's called Rosita after Rosita Missoni so it's a tribute to them I've never heard of them I'll have to go go oh well then they they are the best knitters in the world they are the most top exquisite knitters and I designed for them years and years ago you know when when I first had my first thing come out in vogue they came to get me and we did this amazing collection of knitwear so that was very very excited I knew you when to even though I'm not a knitter yeah yeah well let's go look inside and see what else is here okay excuse me there we go tell me about this particular one it's like baskets or something yeah this is this as Amish baskets and it's it's based on you know traditional Amish girls all all of the quilts in the book are very traditional in their sense and then I'm just flooding my color into it but this was a nice use of the stripes and the solid shot Kotnis well I was looking at your books last night thank you very much and I noticed that there were templates I'm going ah what and so lies is gonna come in here talk about that this is Liza Lucy partnering crime right absolutely what's up with templates well we started our publications in England and the law in the EU in England is that we have metric measurements if we have inches so the problem is if you take two inches and you translate it to metric the number gets weird so by putting templates in the book we stay in within the law but we can have neither inches or metric we have templates so if you see a two inch square template in the back of our books I think you can figure out measuring we can do that yeah this one has zillions of half square triangles of course you cut a square probably second we use no tricks for our half square triangles each one is cut individually and that's because color work is more important to us than speed oh I agree I agree I mean you can do things but I like to do everything one at a time to get it just right we do how exactly so we're after the color every time okay well I see another one over there I want to go talk about it right let's go change thank you use another traditional pattern tell us about this and I love the mix of the stripes and the solids yeah I mean I I just saw one of those wonderful old quilts that's done that triangular thing that people do and cut it up and then it makes these wonderful strange boxes but what I loved was being able to keep the sashing absolutely on the surface mm-hmm and wonderful kind of electric colors and and then have these kind of stripes falling back I'll tell you what I love is that when I look at this piece you have the I don't even know what's this color up here this yeah so pepto bismal yeah yeah yeah exquisitely laid out it mint this mint mint the color mint it ever there's no mistake in that everything is purposely put here and there get a design wall people if you don't have one all right and then down here I want to take a look at another strike this is a really graphic piece tell us about how its constructed well the great thing here was to take my stripes big stripes finer stripes and just sew them together in great strips and then just cut those into triangles it's so it's a very quick and easy one to do and then the background is all just very neutral shot cotton so it just lays back and lets those stripes really dance oh it's just absolutely beautiful I want to take a look now at um a quilt that has zero stripes in it it's just the shot Cotton's yes and I want to talk about what that exactly means okay okay very okay let's go shot Cotton's SH oh I don't know like like shot shop yeah are very different solids than solids explain why well the warp is one color and the West is another color so you get that iridescent and ours are very subtly iridescent I mean you sometimes you don't see it that much but when they're they have a certain look when they're coming from one angle and another coming for another angle so like the center of these it's done in two triangles right but we were very careful to match the way oh because the light the light could have read it differently uh exactly you could and you could purposely say I don't care or I care and you cared on this one yeah yeah so that would look like the solid square okay this is what not but I love yes how many colors are in that do you know I don't even know oh it's like a rainbow I mean this is just and then I want to sneak look next door because look this is here now you've got the classic Amish going on yeah exactly exactly this is Liza doing her own thing going and finding out of her favorite Amish quilts I'm doing just a beautiful rich when we first photograph this before the bathroom in France where it was wall I've been the forest that had been burned oh wow burn chalky Wow and we didn't use that job but it was great I mean this you can imagine the deep wonderful color of this against burnt surface but we ended up with a very nice shot you just gave me an idea we have a place right outside Yosemite oh yeah oh it's a beautiful surface you know tragic but yeah yeah so here's the deal you have many quilts here but there was one specifically that caught my eye and I walked at my goal of course its cave let's go take a look at that okay I have to tell you this is just amazing especially across the room - right yeah how did this come about well I went to South Africa which is probably one of the most creative places I've ever been I mean people take a piece of wire and a whiskey bottle and make something fabulous out of it yeah wonderful and I went to an art center and they had made a huge collage of all ripped magazines and newspapers on a wall and it was just like this and I thought that is so fresh and so dynamic that I took the idea and I just drew out a design on paper quite small and I said I want it to look like this and then Liza went had it blown up big and it was all paper piece okay so Liza is in the in the wings here yeah um tap this I don't even get it how you did it I mean really don't try this at home so I went and took the drawing and I straightened out some of the angles now these were just the overall shapes that cave made not the concentric so show me was show me what you mean so for instance when he made the drawing this probably didn't cross exactly okay there so these were what he drew were shapes like that not the concentric okay okay got it okay yeah so once I had the shapes I cut out the paper and then I drew one inch or I think was 3/4 inch stripes from the outside in so I would have templates - so - in traditional paper piecing method okay if I want ask you you give her the the roots of it are you surprised at what she comes with or not yes I mean what you did was soon apiece kind of like that corner and there was too dense I said you know there's too much color we have to keep putting in cream and white and light to bring in the freshness because I wanted to look like the collage and one of the things that we've developed over 20 years of working together is our own language you'll say ring the changes I know what that means he'll say that's looking dodgy I've been in England a lot but I've gotta say we did use someone else's fabric in this it is a lot of shot Cotton's but we are not particularly good with whites okay something that's wrong rings so these are done by a company called Oakshott okay a wonderful man in India and England yeah who does beautiful shot Cotton's and he specializes in whites and if you look really closely he does these two tone stripes as well no it's right why the solid is you thing I yeah yeah I like that there's beautiful little stripes in that one well hey this is just congratulations you're like isn't it kind of fun to see your your work like this I mean seriously I mean that's the thing about what I love about exhibitions I get to see them nicely hung and lit and know am I covered yes exactly well as Bob just sad uh shows gonna open down five minutes yeah so thank you thank you so much much done thank you thank you great to see you again and I hope you use those stripes I gave you 20 years ago oh I just I just I just like I have that much love I make up my time cups and stuff off thank you

Channel: THE QUILT SHOW

Views: 34,979

Rating: 4.9180326 out of 5

Keywords: Houston 2013, KAFFE FASSETT, LIZA LUCY, ALEX ANDERSON, RICKY TIMS, THE QUILT SHOW, BERNINA, SHOT COTTON, MISSOURI QUILT, FONS, PORTER, QUILT, QUILTING

Id: ClJIF4ITFkI

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2013