Here’s my year in review in pictures! I started doing this last year, I think. These start as Instagram-sized graphics, and then I group them together here. I like to look back at the year visually.

This year was different from recent years, because it was more about making art than showing it.

Here’s the year, more or less in order!

January – February 2024

The year kicked off with a very fun Chicago-themed collage challenge from the Chicago Collage Community folks.

In February, I finished up my micro show for the Garrett Museum of Art, where wonderfully, some of these pieces sold. And I finished the quilt top, We Want Love & Money, Thank You Very Much. You can read about the story being that quilt, and it’s friends in the series, in this blog post.

February – April 2024

It’s been such a long, full year, that I thought I finished that first quilt last year, but nope, it was early this year. We kicked off the new Angelica Kauffman Gallery inside of the Oak Park Art League with a group quilt show with work by Amanda Nadig, Syliva Alexander, Tess Gobeil, Katie Turner and me.

There’s no image for March because I spent much of March finishing up the painting and building of the 14 micro galleries for the group show at the Garrett Museum of Art. I did take photos along the way, but I painted them in my very un-photogenic, unfinished basement. At least one child-visitor called it our “scary basement.” (In a delighted way, they wanted to visit the scary basement.)

Then in April, the show opened!

Garrett, Indiana is home to a small, but beautiful art museum, with a small and hardworking staff of three. Curator Angela Green invited me to work with her on a group micro show. She added the idea of each solo artist also having a 16″ x 20″ piece on the wall. Apologies that that center image isn’t complete. There were 14 solo artists, plus, Mel Kolstad filled the second floor of the museum with 365 tiny framed prints.

An unexpected bonus of this show was that I got to use the dumbwaiter as an additional micro gallery! Those are my tiny quilts and collages. Family members 3D printed this custom ladder for me! And I ordered a custom book from Etsy. You can’t read the title in this photo, but it’s Harriet the Spy. (If you know, you know!)

This show as a lot of work and coordination, and a feat of spacial visualization to fit all 14 micro galleries in my car for delivery! (Thanks to my husband for loading the car.)

This show was definitely my biggest project of the year, and I loved working with all the artists and the museum staff.

Summer and Fall 2024

I was only in three other shows this year in full size galleries, and funnily enough, two of them were in the same place, DankHaus Chicago, home of the German American Cultural Center. In May, Jill Narstedt curated a group show, called You Are Invited, held at DankHaus, of all work by women artists. The opening reception was on a Saturday afternoon, had multiple interactive activities for kids and folks of all ages, and was a rousing success.  I thought I’d written a blog post about this at the time, but I hadn’t, so I just did, with lots of great photos by Kimmy Noonan.  You can read that here.

My second show at DankHuas was Power Frauen: German Women Who Dared to Dream. For this show, artists were invited to select a woman from a list of German-speaking women from the past to make an artwork about. I chose Lotte Reiniger. Here’s a post about my piece.

Staff member Samantha Lundeen set up multiple additional events, including film screenings and artists talks. I was on a panel for one of the artist talks – another artist’s husband took lots of great photos, so it’s documented that if I’m on a panel I’m going to wave my arms around a lot as I speak.  But I haven’t managed to post those anywhere.In the photo above, part of the cyanotype with the scissors has faded – that happens when a cyanotype is in a bright space for a long time, as this piece was, in the gallery. Now that the piece is back in my studio, those details have returned!

This year I taught 15 workshops for the Chicago Public Library system! All project-based workshops for beginning sewists. In my regular job, I teach sewing for more than 12 hours a week, so this felt normal. The challenge was coming up with projects that could be completed within the limited about of time. We made quilt blocks and ironed them on to tote bags, sewed tote bags from scratch, made scrunchies and infinity scarves!

My favorite feedback from students included, “This is exhilarating!” (Said sort of to himself.) And another student thanked me for teaching them to sew, saying that they were no longer afraid of the machine. It was also fun that a number of men took the workshops, as this is less common.

Demand for learning sewing is very high. I’ve talked to my kids about why, and they think it’s driven by TikTok, as well as by a strong desire to live more sustainably, among Gen Z – to repair clothing, make your own, and avoid fast fashion.

Whoops, got slightly out of order, let’s go back to June.

June 2024

In June, as you can see, I was plugging away at the quilts in the Love & Money quilt series. For this one, on the left, I learned a new type of block, this one can be called a Spider Web, or other names. I got better at it as I went along.  Each block is about 20 inches square and each fabric has symbolic meaning, of course.  Quilts take FOR-ever, so I paused to make something much faster, “Who Was She?” You can read about that one here.

August 2024 and All Year

All year long, I took online classes with Maiwa School of Textiles, as well as learning from DVDs (yes, DVDs), Domestika and more. Once I became willing to simmer fabric for an hour in the dye vat, I realized that natural dyeing isn’t quite as difficult as I thought it was. I learned to work with dyes that need a mordant as well as with natural indigo, which doesn’t require mordanting. I got to teach both, natural dyes and shibori with natural indigo, and that was lots of fun.

In August, we had a gap in shows for OPAL, so I filled it with my own work (I’m reliable, nearby and have lots of mini art!) – very miniature works in sardine tins. One sold! Which is super fun.

I also finally made it to a not for profit, digital darkroom, where I took a lesson in using the overhead scanner, to get really high quality images of some of my hankies and doilies.

In about August, I got the notification that my proposed art piece was accepted for the annual textiles show at the CAMP Gallery in Miami, Florida.  CAMP stands for Contemporary Art Modern Project.  Each year the textile show is the Women Pulling on the Threads of Social Discourse show, this year’s version had the subtitle, We Got the Power.  My pieces are textile collages, including a cyanotype, photos printed on fabric, and vintage fabric.  The are 12″ x 24″ and stretched over canvas.  Each piece in this show had to be that size, and they were hung edge to edge like this, like frieze in an ancient Greek temple.

November 2024 to the End of the Year

Here’s my current micro show, up at Jill Narstedt’s Far Northside Gallery in Chicago. For this show, I wanted to make miniature versions of some of my larger pieces. I made a miniature quilt called “Bread & Roses,” I’m still working on the full sized version of that. This is my third micro show of the year! It’s fun to be a solo artist in someone else’s gallery.

The image on the right shows something very exciting I haven’t managed to post or blog about yet – I was contacted by art consultants whose client wanted art print enlargements of 5 of the time cards from the Clocking in for Unpaid Labor project. Shown is Kelley Clink’s awesome time card, scanned at very high resolution and enlarged to 30″ high!

Now we’ll close out the year in review with a look at more finished quilts and quilt tops. There’s one more that’s nearing completion, but not ready to be photographed. Guess I’ll show you that one next year.

More Making – So Many Quilts!

Can you believe I made so many quilts in one year? I was surprised. I mean, it felt like I was spending a lot of time binding quilts… A few of these aren’t quite done. Two are still just quilt tops, one more needs to be bound. But I’m taking a tiny break from quilting to make other things, that are finished faster! I think I made 9 quilts this year! All relatively small, the largest is about 50″ x 50″, but still. I think maybe 5 per year is a more reasonable number. When I have an idea for a quilt, I’m trying to ask myself, okay, but could it be something else? Is there another form that could be used to express this same idea?

Also, ideally, I’m probably a person who just makes the quilt top and then sends it out to be top quilted by someone with a long-arm quilting machine. Author, choreographer and advocate for artists, Andrew Simonet wrote recently (paraphrasing), it’s part of my job as an artist to get the help I need to make my work. I like that reminder. It’s totally okay to have quilt tops finished by someone else, as long as they get credit and it’s disclosed. – that’s not what stops me, it’s the expense.

All in all, a good year in making and teaching! A slower year in showing, but that’s okay. Sometimes it’s time to retreat to the studio and make new work.

Lastly, here’s one that happened just this week, but I took an online training called the Artist Interview Workshop from the not for profit, Voices in Contemporary Art.  I have an artist friend who often asks me, “Wait, what?  Why did you take that class?”

I love to learn things, and get better at things.  I sometimes do paid writing, and one of my favorite types of writing to do is the artist profile.  When I found this workshop, I jumped on it!  It was very well done.  Among other things, we learned about the conservation interview, which prompted me to write this blog post, in which I interview myself, as if I’m the conservator.

And that’s a wrap! I have a solo show booked for next year and am waiting to hear back on other cool things I’ve applied for. If you need me, I’ll be in the studio!

P.S.  This book came out in March!  I didn’t forget about the book, I forgot that it came out in 2024.  Books take a long time, I think I wrote the essay for this all the way back in 2022.  You can find out more about the book on the publisher’s website.  I have an essay, with photos, about my series Medals that You Wouldn’t Want to Earn.