GAM In the Spot Light

Green Apple Martini (aka GAM)

© 2008 Tracy Borders

For Sale

Remember this piece? She's now featured on Embellishment Village's Inspirational Gallery for using their Angelina Fibers!! I'm so honored to be featured amongst other wonderful artists that have used Angelina.

I actually discovered Angelina Fibers by accident. I was in a quilt store & in a discounted bin, there were bags of assorted colors of Angelina Fibers. It was such a deal, I couldn't pass it up & this gave me the opportunity to try something that I had been curious about for some time. My first experiment with Angelina was Green Apple Martini, pictured above. After that, I was hooked!!! I now use it in many of my pieces. It gives that nice little shiny "pop" to my work. (Wished it photographed just a little better.)

Green Apple Martini is for sale in my Etsy store & I have decided to leave her there for a year & should she not sell, then it's the Gods' way of telling me she should hang in my home :)
(I just LOVE those colors!!)

Didn't Make it into Quilt National

This is the first year I've entered a piece into Quilt National. I went in thinking that it probably wouldn't get accepted, since this is the first time I've submitted to this show, but a teeny part of me was SO hoping that it would.

Remember Green Apple Martini?

(also known amongst an inner circle of artist friends as GAM) Well, she was rejected.

She's been entered into a couple of different shows & rejected at both. I think someone's trying to tell me she needs to be put into my Etsy store (which I REALLY hope to have open by the end of October.) I know it's only been two shows & that you probably get more rejections than you do acceptions, but that's ok, on to my next piece.

One great thing, I submitted GAM to Betty at Embellishment Village & she said that she would love to post GAM on their website!! So all was not lost.

(For those that have never seen Green Apple Martini before, she was made from hand dyed bamboo poplin & cheesecloth, thread painted, Angelina Fibers, metal squiggle clips & those bright neon triangles were created from toilet tissue paper casts from rubber stamps.)

Too Hip to Be Square

This was one of my very first attempts at making a small wall quilt & I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It's roughly 11" by 13". I used hand dyed flannel & dyed cheesecloth. The flannel gives off an appearance of a soft muted "fuzziness" which to me, makes me want to run my hands over it.

And what did I learn from this piece? PATIENCE!! I paper pieced this & since it had hard vertical & horizontal lines, I was constantly tearing out seams & re-sewing them back together, trying to keep those lines straight!!

(This piece was in a show, Doing Small Things, sponsored by the Fiber Arts Connection of Southern California, that traveled around the US for the last half of last year & the first part of this year.)

Baby quilts

Undulating Curves


for Carter

I created both of these for a couple of friends of mine for their new babies. I used store bought fabrics for both. I know, I know, being a hand dyeing snob, why didn't I use my own fabric? I just had this underlying fear of "what if I didn't get all of the dye residue washed out of the fabric & mom comes into the room to see that little Johnny had been drooling on the quilt & now has purple dye on his face?" I would never be able to forgive myself.

The blocks are hand stitched together which I love doing. It's so relaxing to sit & watch TV & hand stitch the pieces together. The seams match up SO much nicer than if I would try it with a sewing machine. The quilt tops, however, are machine quilted (that is one place where I don't have the patience to try to attempt hand work) I'm more into creating the design & sewing the design together. The quilting part, I don't really enjoy.