Nothing Like a Deadline

There's nothing like a deadline to help you get things done, right? This weekend I'll be participating in the Piedmont Art Walk, an outdoor open-studios-type event benefiting arts education. For the second year in a row, I'll be joining my mom to show our work in her front yard.

I've done shows with my mom in the past, too, and I love it! My mom is a painter -- she does encaustics and watercolors (here's her website). When we show our pieces together, they enhance each other, even though we don't coordinate what we're going to display in advance.

But now I'm facing a deadline: it's only been a year since our last show, and I have to get enough quilts actually finished to have a whole new show! I will have some pieces available that I've already shown, but it's also fun to be able to present something friends and neighbors haven't yet seen.

I've written before that piecing is my favorite part of making quilts -- I even have a stack of quilt tops to prove it. In the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to get some of those projects from the "in-progress" stage to the "fully complete" stage. I've been quilting, binding, adding hanging sleeves and labels, doing all the things that need to happen to make a quilt ready to show. Here are two of the quilts I'm ALMOST done with (I still have to attach the sleeve to the silk one). I posted their backs in my last post.

I also finished the scrappy chevron star quilt I started in a class and wrote about a couple of months ago. The quilting is more dense than I've done before -- since I imagine this as more of a wall hanging than a cuddle quilt, I wasn't worried about the stiffness.

Since the Art Walk is a fundraiser, I've been trying to think of ways to offer items at a variety of price points. Pricing quilts is tough -- buyers aren't always willing to pay "art prices" for what they see as "just a blanket." And I'm not always willing to sell my quilts at "blanket prices."

So this year I've done two different things. 1) I'm considering having a "sale rack," with quilts I've made in the past that I'm not currently using or displaying. On the one hand, maybe I'll feel better about putting lower prices on items I no longer feel emotionally attached to. On the other hand, I have to remind myself that even if *I* no longer feel an emotional attachment to a quilt, someone else might love it.

2) I made some fabric postcards. Cute, easy, fun, and not a huge investment for a buyer. And a way to use some scraps and novelty prints!

If you're in the Bay Area, come on by and see us on Saturday, May 7th, between noon and 5 pm. Click here for the event map (I'm at #35). There will be about 40 artists exhibiting their work around town -- ceramics, paintings, photography, sculpture, jewelry, and more. I look forward to seeing you!

--Kirsten