QUILT STORIES - Improv star Maria Shell ELECTRIFIES with her Bear Fence quilt

[Music] hi everyone and welcome to quilt stories i'm lisa bolton and today i'm chatting with maria shell who's in alaska and it's really it's fascinating for me because i'm sitting here in sydney australia in winter but it's a nice winter's day and maria maria's up there in her cabin so would you like to say hi and tell us about where you are maria sure so we have a it's called a dry cabin which means there's no running water or out or toilet or shower we have an outhouse and i actually have a shower that's in my wood shed uh we're off the grid and it's a little cabin it was built in 1920 it's in the wrangle st elias national park which is the largest uh wilderness preserve in the united states and it butts up against a canadian preserve so it's actually with the two lands touching each other it's the largest designated wilderness area in the world and we are lucky enough to have a little cabin here that sounds a really interesting place i'm not so sure about the no running water and things but it's not for everyone um i love it though you know today i rode my bike up we have them to get mail we have a mail shack and uh the mail comes twice a week via plane and i ride my bike up to the mail shack and get my mail and it's beautiful sunny day today so we have lots of solar power so my iron is working and i've had a good day in the studio and i love it great sounds lovely i'm going to switch it over to the screen sharing so we can talk about your quilt all right and here we have a lovely photo of you and your quilt which is called bear fence why is it called bear fence because out here in mccarthy we live across the street from environmental science art and educational facility and i'm a member of the board it is an organization that's been around since the 1970s and during the summer when we have programs on we are growing our own food and we compost everything so we have a compost pile with an electric bare fence around it so my children we have three boys and i showed them the bare fence because we compost over there and i explained to them it's electric you can't touch it but each and every one of them had to touch the bare fence and get shocked for real like they all had to have that experience and as i was making this quilt it just reminded me of the bare fence and of that summer and all of the boys touching the bare fence i love that this is an initial sketch i presume yes so a lot of times i will sketch out an idea and the idea for this quilt was basically i i've written a book and it's called improv patchwork and in it it breaks down all these different sort of improv units that you can make and i thought well you know i i've made a lot of quilts that have components in them but i've never like used my book to make a quilt so i broke it down into you know there's four different units in this quilt and you'll see that it changed from from the initial drawing what i make the sketch is i don't have to follow it it's just there as my initial idea and i most often will deviate because for me i want to get the best quilt and if the best quilt is something different from what i sketched then i'm always going to choose the best quilt and whatever component from the quilt that was good but didn't make it into the final quilt well that can roll over into the next quilt so what we have here are your strips so you've pre-ordained i assume your your color palette yeah so this is really just an example of one of my color palettes and something i talk about when i teach is how to pull basically an 8 to 12 color palette what i try to do is to represent the entire color wheel along with neutrals and big thing really is and it's the way i phrase it is each color should hold its own and by that i mean no matter what color it's next to it doesn't become absorbed into that other color now some of the colors i call them weak links and if you look on the bottom row you'd see this sort of dark forest green and if you were to place it next to that gray that it's caddy corner from that would be a weak link in that that forest green and that gray placed next to each other are not going to be very dynamic and they're going to glom onto each other so as i'm piecing i'm going to i'm never going to put those two together now later on in the composition they may end up next to each other at a point when i can't control it but as long as i can control it i'm going to so these pieces so this is the palette and then we're all cut up to do this what we're looking at now which is to stitch them into pairs and as you can see i'm i'm always trying to pair them so that they're beautiful like they a lot of people that teach improv will say oh just stitch it together just stitch it together it doesn't matter just stitch it together if you do that a lot of times the only way you can resolve your composition is by floating it on a neutral background there's no way that you can put pattern on top of pattern which is my favorite thing to do if you haven't been controlling your color combinations from the very beginning so this is just a big mess of them so i will cut like we saw that big the whole color palette and i cut them into chunks then i go to the sewing machine and i pair them and then this is another sort of trick of mine that i frequently find students are reluctant to do and that is use you stitch them together once and then you need to press you don't get to stitch them to another set and then another set where you end up with all these seams that haven't been pressed you really have to cut stitch press and then i cut again because i shape everything which i think we'll we're going to look at a little slide that talks about that also so this is me i call these short row stripes and that's what i was building with those units that you saw all cut up and then pieced and a lot of times when i get a unit big enough to be put on the design wall even though i know what i'm going to do with it most likely in my quilt but i will take those units and play around with them and photograph them as potential ideas for something that i might do in a different quilt so i'm always like i'm looking at the units as they're going to go into a composition but also what they can do with each other just on their own so these are those what i call short row stripes pieced together and i guess something else that i should point out here is that when i make the initial cut so you can see that these are all probably four inches wide what i'd normally do is i'll do a skinny cut of fat cut a medium cut and by that i mean they'll be four inches by one four inches by two and four inches by three but then i also go in and i cut i call it skinny and down i cut some of them to be skinnier so that i am continuing to create a variation in the line so all of the tan strips are not all four by two inches when you look at a traditional quilt and it's a strip set and all of the strips are predictably the same length and width your eye quickly understands what's happening and is often like i'm done you know they've they're they're no longer the eye and the brain are no longer stimulated whereas here because like say well let's focus on the yellow ever you look at the yellow and you start moving your eye moves around you're like those aren't all the they're the same color but they're not all the same width and your eye thinks that's exciting and it tells the brain hey brain those yellows aren't all the same and so then the brain engages it's it's part of how i like to mess with things is to make it vibrate and be interesting to look at so every time i cut stitch press and then i i call it shaping and that is making every unit look beautiful at every stage as well as making some of as we were talking about the yellow some of the yellow skinnier and that is just my pile of leftovers from shaping so this is another sketch where there's a point where it's all got to fit together which you know i do all this bit work and i have who knows how many seams in my quilts and and it becomes quite complicated in getting them to fit together and lay flat so we've been looking at my short row strips and i'm going to attach this elongated triangle shape onto them and i don't want to lose a lot of the triangle shape so i'm i'm measuring things out i always tell my students i use a ruler i don't use a ruler so there are times when it's got to fit together for example if you look at the square in a square i know what size it needs to be in the end it doesn't matter what the other squares are on the inside in fact it's much more interesting and organic if they aren't all the same so that's that those units are all built together and if you start your eye at first it's like okay those are green and red triangles those are pretty cool looking and then you start looking around and you see that some of them are smaller and some of them are significantly smaller if you go down to the bottom middle the one in the middle on the bottom on the left side you'll see there's one little triangle that is a little teeny stubby thing and that is me finagling those so they'll fit together to be i need this unit to be a certain size but i don't care what anything's doing on the inside of that i mean i do care i'm controlling everything but i don't have a need to have them all be exactly the same in fact i would prefer if they're not yeah and it's certainly it makes it vibrate more so those are the squares in a square same thing going on that i needed to make them a certain size and i'm pretty happy with how this is all coming together i like the palette this is one palette but these short row stripes have the complete palette within them whereas the green and red which are in the palette have been isolated to form those triangle units the same thing with the blue those are in the original palette but they don't necessarily look like it i at some point decided that i was gonna do this checkerboard which in my book i call it a continuous nine patch which is basically if you know how to make a nine patch it's the same process but instead of stopping it a nine patch you keep adding on to it i realized when i got this on the design wall it was looking pretty static and i this is a quilt where i was on deadline which is i'm always on deadline but i realized i was heavily relying on my ruler and that i don't like to do that i've i'm someone that will grab like i want to control everything so the ruler is a form of controlling things but something made all with the ruler is not nearly as interesting as something made more organically so i'm always having to sort that dialogue with myself and these this checkerboard is static and i was really disappointed in how it was looking and i knew it was about the fact that it was all ruler-based i thought about it and i realized i needed to cut into that so i think that's so there's another you can see it's static it's got good graphic quality but it's not it's not what it could be i mean it's gonna get a lot better but i had to do this which was uh hard cut into things and it's like oh no isn't gonna work but i did it and then i inserted some more and i made them rectangles instead of squares so this has the original in it but i don't know how i couldn't i couldn't recreate it for you i'm not exactly sure how i got there other than i cut into it and i added and i it's much more dynamic a lot more exciting to look at so this is all pieced and stitched together and quilted this photo is taken by my photographer chris aaron who does for almost 15 years it's good yeah it took a while in the beginning because quilts are tricky to photograph because you want that balance of for me anyway i want to keep that graphic quality but the thread work which is a huge component of what we do you also want that to be visible so this is the back side of my quilt and i i don't know probably about 10 years ago because i've always sort of done this tight type of quilting but i had used prints or other fabrics that didn't really highlight the quilting so eventually i settled on using what are called cross weaves some of the brand names that people may know would be shot cotton by k fossette or pepper corey has a brand of shot cottons uh cross weaves also so basically what a cross weave is is that the warp and the left can be dramatically different threads or they can be very similar but they're not the same and it gives the fabric a bit of a sheen and i found that it works magic with my quilting so there's something about that shot cotton that allows my quilting to look really beautiful and at the same time it hides mistakes in a way that just a solid flat say kona cotton kona cotton wouldn't do the same thing and that's another close-up and that is the full quilt with that black uh edging on it is a facing which is a garment technique that many art quilters have adopted or modified for their own purposes and i love it because it gives that clean edge around the final composition in a way that a binding you know a binding becomes a component of the final composition because it's a thin line that goes around your quilt and i really like that clean edge that is very much like a painting i don't frame or mount my quilts but i do like them to have that clean edge that a facing provides yeah i'm i'm a facing person as well they just don't need that frame do they no and it's interesting for me i can tell it's like 2009 when i made the you know there are a couple of quilts that i have that are really you know they'd have a really good show record and they're um in collections but uh they've got that binding and it really was a date you know when i went from binding to no binding this is the quilt and it's called bare fence really vibrates and i since you mentioned the electric fence i can i can see it it's really cool i've got three well two don't look very happy but one looks happy this is we used to go on this annual camping trip with a bunch of families uh fourth of july weekend i like this photo of them because it's very indicative of their personality so they have they're whittling they're whittling sticks right now and i think tripp who is the star wars guy with the frown on his face he probably wasn't allowed to whittle and then the middle one obviously is you know attempting to split his own throat or whatever but and then the oldest one has got that wasn't me t-shirt on anyway this is around the age they were when they decided that they had to electrocute themselves with the fence and now this is them this year the middle son ozzy who's also me the middle one in the other photo graduated from high school and actually the oldest one fletcher who's on the left in the photo he graduated from college and the youngest one with the create my sunglasses on uh is a 16. but we had this it was very special actually because neither of them got to graduate in the way that they um would have if covid wasn't going on but one of the moms got it had this great idea we had a socially distanced super small little outdoor graduation and that's a photo from that event so it was really nice that fletch was home and we and we all got to go to that and here is a copy of your book yeah which has been out for a couple of years now very popular i i believe it is sort of a manual for how to make these different units uh all of several of which were in that bare fence quilt so it's not a book that's going to tell you how to step by step make one of my quilts but it is going to empower you to make units that you can then make your own quilts for example the quilt on the front here you i don't have instructions for how you cut each strip and sew them together but if you read the book you could figure out how to make your version of this and that is oh that's what i'm interested in is empowering people to be their own quilters so you're in your little cabin yeah and are you doing any online classes or online lectures i am starting and if anyone's interested they can get a hold of me through my website all the details uh all maria's links are below in in the description area please check them out it's been lovely to chat to you and now i'm all inspired to go and cut up some fabric which is um but i'm always inspired to cut up fabric i've really enjoyed listening to your thought processes i think it's it's fascinating how different quilters work you have a style of your own you're also part of the cloth in common group that i am part of and yes we're currently working on our latest piece i find it really interesting that we have 12 quilters from all over the world and we all come up with completely different ideas so if you haven't checked out the clothing common site please do and you'll see my quilts and maria's quilts and another 10 10 very talented artists as well and so i'd like to thank you so much for your time today and enjoy the rest of your time up in your little cabin with no electricity and running water and things and we have power we just don't because we get our power from the sun and we do have lights in here but i haven't turned them on all summer kovit has slowed us all down and this is even slower and i think there's something to be said for slowing down i agree i think when we do recover from from this time in our lives i think we are all going to be very different people i'm actually quite enjoying that slowing down as well so we'll see what happens let's let's hope that it doesn't take too long to happen yeah i think we're gonna be different and i think hopefully we'll be a better world you know i hope uh it'll all be worth it if some good things come out of it in the end i'm sure they will but we are lucky as quilters that we have quilting right i mean yes and we when we have this community and thank goodness for the internet and i hope everyone's really enjoyed this insight into maria's um alaskan wilderness hideaway and if you have enjoyed it please click the subscribe button below it's just in the corner and also a thumbs up would be really good as well so that we can thank you so that i'm inspired to make more of these videos because i'm really enjoying them it's my sort of covered therapy i guess but i know that i the feedback that i'm getting is that people are really enjoying getting to know these amazing quilters so thank you so much maria and i look forward to seeing your next work in our cloth in common challenge bye bye lisa you

Channel: Lisa Walton

Views: 3,295

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: improv, modern quilts, quilting, quilts, patchwork, stripes

Id: DHHC_EaBcsk

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020