Posted 9/3/11

I realized I haven’t posted about the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative in a while, so here’s a quick reminder about a fantastic organization! Right now, quilts are up for auction right here. You can bid right from the comfort of your own home and all of the proceeds go to Alzheimer’s research.

This month, the awesome quilt shown above by the talented Kathy Kennedy-Dennis is being auctioned, and as a bonus, it has my signature on it. :)  The names of 59 quilting luminaries are featured in the center block. Last year at the festival, Kathy carefully collected our autographs. She is wonderful, a talented quilter, and a tireless volunteer to boot!

Every month, I get to assist with some AAQI auction preparations, and it’s hard not to fall in love with a quilt while I am uploading and editing things. This month, I love this quilt featuring a whimsical dragonfly by Didi Salvatierra. I think it’s the eyes. Too cool.

If you’re a quilter, the AAQI is still hoarding quilts to sell at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, TX in November. So, use your Labor Day holiday and make a few Priority: Alzheimer’s quilts to send their way. Check out the guidelines here. I just send a batch before school started, and here is a preview of one of my favorites, Love Skulls. Look for it to be sold or auctioned soon! It is Quilt #7924 if you want to search the AAQI site for it’s status.

Posted 4/29/09

The Collage Mania preview is up! There are 383 collages available on May 5, 2009 for an $80 minimum donation. On May 6 and 7, 2009, they will be available for a $40 minimum donation. This is the last fundraiser for Fiberart for a Cause which benefits the American Cancer Society. Thank you, Virginia Spiegel and Karen Stiehl Osborn for all of your hard work on this project!

I donated 3 collages for the sale this year, which are located on page 15 of the Collage Mania preview. Take a look, find something lovely and donate generously.

Posted 3/20/09

The International Fiber Collective is working on a collaborative project, Interdependence (The Tree Project). They have been collecting leaves made with fiber techniques for a tree installation.

A quote from their website: “Much like a live tree is interdependent on its leaves and roots for survival, societies are interdependent on the greater whole, family units, communities, and countries.”

Another artist noted on her blog that they will be accepting leaves past their original deadline, so I found a few minutes (i.e. got up earlier) this week to make a few leaves.

The leaf on the left was made with leftover pieces from a larger work I created last year, which involved cutting up whole quilted pieces and re-structuring them. The leaf in the middle is made from painted corrugated cardboard coffee cup sleeves that were then machine stitched. The leaf on the right was created with a leftover piece of interesting fabric that a fiber friend gave to me, which I painted and quilted. This fabric is used for disposable gowns, etc.

Thanks for the project, International Fiber Collective! I can’t wait to see the final installation photos.

Posted 1/19/09

This is one of the little Priority: Alzheimer’s quilts, Rain or Shine, that I donated to Ami Simms’ project, the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.

It’s time to celebrate!  I made a commitment to donate enough Priority: Alzheimer’s quilts to bring in $1000 of revenue for the non-profit. Thanks to those who purchased my quilts, I’ve exceeded my $1000 goal!  Thank you to all those who donated $ to receive a quilt, some of you I know, and some I don’t. You can see my page of donated quilts here.

You too can donate or purchase quilts, see the traveling exhibit Alzheimer’s: Forgetting Piece by Piece (I also have a quilt in the show), buy the book, or get involved in other ways! What an amazing way to raise $ for Alzheimer’s disease research.  Ami and all of her volunteers rock my world.

Posted 12/10/08

This is my weekly journal quilt 49/52 2008, 6″ x 8.  This is the second piece that I will be donating to the Artist’s Valentine project. It’s funny how I will think a piece of surface designed fabric is a failed experiment and then later find the perfect way to use it. This red background piece is an experiment I didn’t really think worked out. I was working with a new water based resist product and I didn’t like the way the red paint bled into the areas that were supposed to be white. For this piece, though, I like the contrast between the crisp teal/blue hearts I painted on next to the fuzziness of the red spirals. I used freezer paper templates to create the painted hearts.  For the quilting on this piece, I got to play with a new toy from the Houston International Quilt Festival.  I purchased a circular attachment for my Bernina. Now, before you criticize the unevenness of the stitch lengths or that some shapes are spirals and not circles, this is not the fault of the attachment! I tried some regular circles (which were perfect by the way.) But I also tried using the attachment the “wrong” way and got awesome spirals.  To finish this piece, I fused a piece of fabric to the back of the interfacing and zig zagged the edges.

Posted 12/9/08

This is my weekly journal quilt 48/52 2008, 6″ x 8″. It’s the end of the year, and I’m all engrossed with the larger quilt I’m making! This is good, but sometimes it makes my brain a little full for ideas for new weekly journal quilts. I decided to make a couple of journal quilts specifically to donate to the Artist’s Valentine project. It’s a cool project that has artist’s donate valentines for a sale of artwork, and then the money is then given back to artist’s that contributed (based on a juried process.)

I started this piece by sewing a brown paper bag with red stamped images on it to a red and white print fabric for the base. I then added red tulle in crossways strips across the piece and sewed them down. Then, the REALLY fun part started! I cut up some treasured red and white coffee cup sleeves from a holiday series that Starbucks did a couple of years ago. I crazy pieced all the little pieces without logos from the coffee cup sleeves  together with red zig zag stitches on my sewing machine. When I had a large enough piece to work with, I cut this piece into a heart and sewed it to the based piece. I fused a back on and zig zagged the edges to finish.

Posted 10/27/08

It’s Halloween, one of my favorite times of the year!  This is a photo of our Halloween tree, in all it’s fabulousness.  It makes me giggle. I mean come on, there are stretchy skeletons hanging from ribbon nooses. What’s not to love?

If you’re going to be visiting the Houston International Quilt Festival, don’t miss my quilts!  One Tree Quilt and Dragon are in the judged show Quilts: A World of Beauty.  Also, Little Red Spot is in the Special Exhibit, The Sky’s the Limit. 

The Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative will be having a booth where you can purchase Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilts, a handful of which are mine this year. All proceeds go to Alzheimer’s research.  Stop in and say hello to Ami and Debbie and take home a quilt! Ami is taking 1000 donated quilts, so there’s surely one to please you.  Please check out Ami’s blogpost here for all the details.

I am also bringing ACEO’s to trade at the Quilting Arts booth.  The theme this year was holidays, so of course skulls came to visit my work! I had a lot of fun working with both paint and paintstiks in these pieces. You can see some of them in the photo below.

Posted 4/29/08

Onions, 2008, Naomi S. Adams

Check out the 235 donated collages that you could purchase next week on Virginia Spiegel’s site! There are 21 pages of gorgeous collages to choose from. You can read about the 4 collages I donated here.

Collage Mania II opens Monday, May 5 at 9 a.m. (collages for a donation of at least $80) and continues May 6 (collages for a donation of at least $40). Thanks to the generosity of the donating artists, 100% of the proceeds are donated directly to the American Cancer Society through Fiberart For A Cause.

There are so many collages that I am drooling over, but I’ll just blog about one I keep returning to. It’s just so colorful and bright! Check out Gerrie Congdon’s Kimono Collage. You have to scroll down to find it, as Virginia wants everyone to peruse as much art as possible and donate $$ for some collages! Happy collaging.

Posted 4/23/08

I’m delighted to say that One Tree Quilt has won an award at the AQS Paducah, KY Quilt Show this year! It received the Olfa Young Designers Okada Award. I am completely excited and honored. This piece is an extension of a 2007 weekly journal quilt that was so intriguing that I decided to make it on a larger scale. Go weekly art! My husband really encouraged me to make this piece on a larger scale and so he is super excited about tHIS award.

And yes, I can’t wait to spend the $5000 on art quilting supplies. Here’s looking forward to stimulating the art quilting economy.

If you are lucky enough to be at the show right now, please stop by and smile! All of the AQS award winners can be seen here. By the way, I would like to point out that 3 of the Alzheimer’s Forgetting Piece by Piece artists won awards in this show. Congrats to Diane Gaudynski and Becky Goldsmith.

Posted 4/14/08

All of the Killer Bee Designs Free Fabric Postcard Patterns are now listed on one page on my website. You can find and download them here. If you are new to making fabric postcards, please read the General Fabric Postcard Instructions first.

Please feel free to use them for your own use or for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. You can make a difference by making a small quilt or fabric postcard and donating it to the AAQI for the Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilts project.

I have pledged to donate enough quilts to AAQI to bring in $1000 for the cause. Thanks to generous donors who have purchased my quilts, I have helped raise $605 to date. Here is a link to the page of the quilts I have donated: Naomi’s $1000 promise page.

Some of my quilts are for sale right NOW as part of the Mother’s Day Fabric Postcard Sale. Mine are #1062, 2090, and 2091.

However, even cooler is that my sister and tiny nieces and nephews made some fabric postcards, which are also for sale! Theirs are #2140-2145. Check out the press release here.