QUILT STORIES - Quilting ICON Katie Pasquini Masopust shares her latest Quilt & a scary makeover

hi everyone i'm lisa walton and welcome to quilt stories today i'm very thrilled to be talking to katie pasquini massapest who has been one of my idols for so long i've been looking at her work and admiring it forever and i haven't been able to do any of her classes so today i'm hoping to pick up a few hints because i just love to work so welcome katie thank you i'm honored to be here this is very exciting it is it's not exciting but it's an interesting experience doing this sort of thing in um in this terrible covert time but it's a great yes yes today we're looking at a called concertina which is one of the series that katie is doing and because she didn't have lots of photos of the process we're just going to steal some from other quilts that she's been making and you'll get the idea so here we have katie sitting at her machine and the beautiful finished quilt which is one in the series how many in the series katie so far i'm working on the third one now i can see the quilting the detail and the quilting is lovely i love all that free motion quilting oh i'm not doing that yes it's so freeing isn't it yeah no not following any rules just doing your own thing okay just drawing all over the surface with the sewing machine so here you are in part of your studio i would think with a nice view out the window and can you tell me a little bit about the painting that you're doing okay so um i paint on canvas and i start with the canvas being very thin canvas and i treat it with gac 100 which sort of seals it i can't use gesso or anything thick because eventually i want to sew over the canvas so i keep it real thin and i paint um four or five different canvases different color schemes different kinds of marks and then do different layers sometimes i add some fabric to it little bits of black and white graphics and then paint again so there's usually about four layers of paint so visually it looks thick but it's really very thin paint i use flow release to keep the paint really thin and so that then i cut these different canvases up as if they're just regular fabric and then do a zigzag stitch to hold them together so it stays one layer i'm now going to show some of the beautiful paintings yeah so i i kind of go with a um ombre look from light to dark so that i can cut up different parts of the paintings to get different values when i start making the construction so i first put down a ground from light to dark and then a series of marks in this case it's just straight lines to sort of make a grid and then i cut out black and white fabrics i'm always shopping and looking for fun black and white graphics and so i cut those up and and put them down attaching them with gac 100 which sort of adheres them to the surface and then when that's dry then i put another layer of marks that cross the fabric so it sort of sets the fabric down into the painting so it's not really a painting like a portrait or a landscape it's just sort of marks that i'll get to cut up and put back together so here's more black and white fabric yeah little checkerboard in there so the there i think i did four paintings for this particular piece and so i just picked a color scheme yep beautiful blue one beautiful magenta with stripes and cutting fabrics that give me this great repeat patterning that goes along with it so here is a resulting piece i can see that yes the center circle is not stitched down yet but these are all from your canvas from those canvases and then i had another one you can see the very light so i did a canvas that was very light for sort of the background and so then i then i cut them up and and play around with different forms i think i did two completed constructions and then chose this one yes this was the other one i played with to me when i got that one done i didn't like the composition it was it was just too busy the other one was more calming the next one that your next quilt that you're working on um but just to see the effect of cutting out the fabrics and stitching them down with zigzag so we're still with the canvas yep this is a this is the third one in the series that i'm just starting to work on and um cutting it up you can see that i zigzag it down with black thread i like the look of the black thread against the colors it just sort of frames each little piece nicely and so here this is where the acetate i lay the acetate a large sheet of acetate matte acetate on the top of it and first i draw the the construction lines basically of all these little blocks of painted canvas that i'm going to translate it into blocks of fabric so i and i do corrections like you can see the big triangle on the right i wanted it to be a little bigger so i just made it a little bigger and i'll just draw it to be larger rather than have to re-cut and repaint everything yeah i'm gonna get so that's sort of like the structure of it how big are these pieces um this is probably if you could see from the mat it's probably about 24 by 18 20 inches across okay so almost the size of a big mat actually yes but this is though isn't it this is still your no the quilt will then be twice as big as this i take it to a blueprint shop once the drawing's finished and they enlarge it for me and then that becomes my templates so here you can see i'm making some corrections i don't i'm not drawing my line exactly because i wanted it to be a little more skewed and here i've added the half inch to that big triangle and then when i feel that i'm pretty strong and happy with the way those are coming together then i take a fine pigma pin and draw all the brush strokes so i just sort of trace around the shapes here you can see i've started doing that and i just love doing this part i just love sitting and drawing around the paint marks and and making this cartoon so to speak um that i just envision all the different bits of fabric i get to play with to fill in kind of a pink by number actually it is a little bit when i first started looking at these i couldn't quite work out what you were doing but you've since told me that your original painted canvas is just really the basis you're now going to recreate that using normal commercial fabrics not fabrics yourself which is really fascinating so you you now start to match them up right so there's the completed drawing and then i put um a big piece of white paper on the back of it and take it to the print shop and so that they can make a copy of it so it's a rather large thing that comes back 40 40 something inches i take that line drawing enlargement i have a make three or four of them for me and then i use spray glue and poster board and spray it to that so i have a thickness because i turn all of my edges of my fabric so yes i don't use raw edge um so i will cut these like cut the little shape out so if you see a circle there cut out the circle mark it on the fabric and then there there you can see i i take and then um with spray starch and hot iron i turn the edge over this cardboard template as i cut it out and then i glue it down to the foundation fabric for each of the little blocks and then i'll take a zigzag monofilament thread and zigzag invisible zigzag i'll sort of applique the pieces down and then i i will i'll move on to the next unit and do the same thing and then piece those together along the line and then you tear i i have silky totally stable that i use as a foundation i draw all the design onto that so i know where to put all these pieces and then that gets torn off and then i have my quilt top and then i'll quilt it wow so i did say that i turn all my edges but you see the little gray dot and dots and the white dots when they're too small to turn i use ultra suede because ultra suede has a thickness so it looks as if it's a turned edge and it doesn't ravel or fray so i don't have to worry about little threads hanging everywhere and so i use ultra suede for tiny little circles and things but everything else is turned edge all the fabric that you are matching to your painting you've obviously got a ginormous stash i do yeah i i find that i find that fascinating that you created a painting and then you match it up with fabric i think that's quite astounding putting them in it it does take a while i find it very soothing you know i listen to music and it's just soothing to get because it's kind of messy when you're cutting everything out but then you turn the edges and it looks just really clean my fabrics i tend to buy fabrics that read as one fab one color so not big wild prints and things because i'm sort of making big wild prints out of these more subdued fabrics so this is the finished concertina quilt with all your little bits and pieces that you have put down individually and turned edges i'm very impressed with that and then quilters you have more patience than i do here is detail of it yeah my my favorite part is when it's all done all of your artistic choices have been made and you just get to free motion quilt over the surface and it's just sort of like like if you were painting and you added a little pen and ink drawing to the top that's how i kind of liken this that i'm i'm just drawing all over the surface to give texture and movement and kind of bind everything together and you work in a series i've always worked in series i find it a really satisfying way to explore ideas and you know my first series was on mandalas so a way of drafting i've done three-dimensional design fractured landscapes and so i get an idea and i just stick with that for you know sometimes it takes a couple years to explore the whole thing and then then i get kind of like okay i think i've figured out anything i can come up with new in this idea and then kind of think take a few days off go around for talk taking photographs or painting and so like this new series that we're talking about here is based on painting the different canvases cutting them up and making the composition and then translating that into fabric and that's really i feel like i've i'm in the best series ever right now because i get to paint and then i get to quilt and you know one half of my studio is the wet studio where i've all set up for painting i showed a picture of that earlier and the other half which is basically another room on the top floor is um all dry studio where all my fabric is and my sewing machines my big cutting table so i'm just i'm just very blessed and very lucky girl indeed you are and you've been doing it for a long time and inspiring thousands of students i would think over those years okay so so half of my studio is of the wet studio where i paint and this is all on the second floor of my home so there's two big rooms up there one of them is the guest room and the paint studio and the other one's my fabric studio and there's a very this very messy picture of my fabric stash um i think that's very well organized it's all sorted by color and then by value seven value steps from very light to very dark and one thanksgiving i always have thanksgiving with my cousin and her daughter and her daughter kristen is a marie condo organizer oh and her mom was going to make her a quilt for a girlfriend who was having a baby and so she asked kristen to come up and look through my fabric to get ideas for colors and kristen came down and she was just white as a ghost she couldn't how can you even work in that mess up there and i was like well everything's in order so she came back a couple of weeks later and spent a week with me and we marie condo'd all of my fabric folded everything into these neat little compact units and put them in the drawers and you can see how beautiful it is after it looks like candy you can open up any of those drawers and it looks like little yummy candy and so it took forever to fold all that fabric perfectly um at first she asked me can we throw some of this out and i was like oh no you can't throw anything out after you try to fold some of these weird bits of fabric that you have left in your stash it's sort of like okay we can throw that one out it's just too hard to fold so we got it all organized and it will stay that way because i don't ever want to have to fold all that fabric again so at the end of each project i neatly fold it back up and put it um back into the drawer well i'm astounded but that i just she marie terrifies me when i watch some of those things happening i was pretty terrified for a while but it worked out beautifully it did it did it's amazing and just looking behind you you actually have um two of your quilts with the canvas version and then the real quilt yes yes that's perfect just gives us an idea of the different sizes that's fabulous you can come back now thank you okay there you are now you've got uh connection with the allegrae retreat yes um allegri retreat started oh my gosh maybe 25 30 years ago when my husband and i first moved from southern california to santa fe new mexico and i started the legree retreat as a art quilt escape or place to come learn and hung a big quilt show and did it there for 14 years and then i said i'm i'm done they they the building was being remodeled that i did it in and it was just too much work and one of my students maureen hendricks came every came for 13 of the 14 years and was so upset when i quit said i was gonna stop and she said well when i build my resort will you come teach it for me there and i'm like yeah right when you build your resort i'll be right there well three years later they had john hendricks started the discovery channel and his wife maureen is a quilter and they built this beautiful resort and now i run my retreat up there for maureen at gateway canyons resort and once a year in april although we had to cancel this year everything's been canceled this year but april 2021 we'll be back with guns blazing ready to do everything we've missed out for in this whole year but it's a fun retreat um for our quilters and i know that um maureen is a great supporter of sakura studio art called circuits and i know that you are a former president the second president after our lovely founder yvonne porcella you and i are both ex-presidents so yeah we have a strong connection with sakura and sakura has a benefit auction every year in september and maureen bought hundreds i feel like of the 12-inch square auction pieces and has decorated a lot of the retreat area with those coins yes the resort has um a lot of quilts these 12-inch blocks she's had them all beautifully framed they're hanging in all of the guest rooms um i have a couple of huge quilts one hanging over the ballroom and one in the entry there's quilts by nancy crowe judy warren bladen uh hollis chatelain has one there so she just decorates with quilts it's a beautiful place you have also online classes through i quilt and i will put all the details in the information section of of this video and all of all of katie's links as well i would like to thank you so much for giving me this insight into your work i feel very very honored that um i've been able to look into your web studio in your dry studio and and had wonderful close-ups of your work thank you for having me it was very it was fun talking to you so far away so close so far away i know and um see you in person soon i i hope so so thank you everybody for watching the video uh if you've enjoyed it which i hope you have please click on the subscribe button below make sure that you also do the thumbs up because that shows that you like it if you have any comments please leave them below thanks katie and uh if you have any suggestions for other cultures that you would like me to talk to because um i'm really fortunate that that i can just sit and chat and and learn heaps and i hope you have too so thanks everybody and bye for now you

Channel: Lisa Walton

Views: 3,238

Rating: 4.985507 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, saqa, alegre retreat, fabric painting, abstract, quilts, patchwork, art quilts, innovative quilting, painting, textiles, Quilt, How to make a quilt

Id: XCxsjWnvZD4

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020