The Night Owl's Perch
by Lois Frankel
Links related to each major topic are included with that topic. A few miscellaneous links are at the bottom of the page. If you're interested in old Macintosh or S-100 computers, or in amateur astronomy (including his first quilt, depicting Jupiter), see my husband, Herb Johnson's, page.
Quilts
Indigo Sun was designed in Electric Quilt 5 (one block in Patch Draw) and assembled based on techniques learned in the Points and Curves class at Quilt University. Completed 2004.
Metropolis is my third spray & play quilt. I spray-dyed this fabric, took a digital photo, then started playing with it on the computer to decide what to do with the fabric. THe first step was to cut out five strips and flipped them 180 degrees. Then I cut & flipped two circles out of the result. Completed 2004.
Primordial is my second spray & play quilt, completed 2002. A single rectangle was flipped from the original spray-dyed fabric. More hand-dyed perle cotton came in handy.
Emergence (completed 2002) is the first of my "spray & play" quilts. Fabric was spray-dyed and, in this case, left as a whole-cloth piece in the center. I used some hand-dyed perle cotton thread to accentuate the color boundaries.
Smoke and Ash begain with an experiment with layered hand-dyed fabric. I've been playing with purple and orange, and was quite pleased with the way the initial piece came out. One of my favorite processes for hand-dyed fabric is to take a digital photo, then manipulate it in a graphics program to see what I can do with it. In this case, I flipped two rectangular portions, made ano iece of orange & purple fabric to make a narrow border, and added some commercial black fabric for the other borders. After getting part way through this process, I was reminded of smoke and fire, and the Joni Mitchell song with the lyrics "...smoke and ash... we love our freedom," so I quilted flames, smoke, and sparks, which you can see in this detail. This piece is 31" x 35" and was completed in May 2002, and shown in Sept. 2002 at the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extrav aganza.
Impromptu is made from hand-painted fabric, embellished with rayon and metallic threads. Size: 29" by 26".
Tentatively titled "Millennial Sunset," but might become "Dawn of the Millennium." Since I am more of a sunset-person than a dawn person, I'm leaning toward the former. Most of the fabrics in the quilt are my own hand-dyes, but there are also two commercial prints and one commercial hand-dye. Size is approximately 39x42" 
"Cometary Vision," my interpretation of comet Hale-Bopp, completed December 1999. I selected about 16 different black fabrics for the background, various reds, pinks, blues, and purples for the tails, and various lights for the head. The head is covered in shimmer-fabric to increase its luminosity. View a detail. Machine quilted. Size approx. 54 x 40".
The cat isn't done yet, but I finally finished "Mountain Lake" (on the right).
There is also a detail.
The centers are dye-painted on ordinary
white muslin. Each of the centers is about 18" x 24". If you look at the tapestry near the bottom of the
page, you may notice that the landscape design is basically the same.
"Hide the Salmon!" hangs in my bathroom, which is done in 1950's
salmon. Rather than redoing the room, I'm covering the salmon as much as possible. I started with
a shower curtain in greens and purples, then made this quilt (which uses the 9-degree wedge
ruler) in a class on how to use the ruler. It's about 36" by 40" and hangs behind and above the
salmon toilet, over the salmon wallpaper (which may yet come down someday!). Here's a close-up.
"Russian Blue in Pink" is made from fabrics I dyed myself
(except for the binding and backing). The main image was batiked - dye-painted using wax resist,
and the border was dyed in a baggie. I based the design loosely on a Russian cat-image found in a
clipart book, using the wax to make the outlines, and then painting on the dyes. The cat-image
was then stuffed for a trapunto effect and machine-outlined with rayon threads. The rest was
hand-quilted. Size is about 21" x 26".
"I can Twist a Rainbow" - I used the same block design and
as for "Twisted but Still Sane," and laid it out using Electric Quilt 3. The blocks were
paper-pieced, half of them using a Singer 201 electric and the other half using a well-worn
Singer 66 Redeye treadle. Treadling turned out to be much easier than I'd thought, and it's great
when you need precision for paper piecing. Size is about 41" x 49". This piece was finished in 2001 and displayed at the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza in Sept. 2002.
"Twisted but Still Sane," completed 1997. A study for "I can Twist a
Rainbow" above, using the twisted log cabin block. The colors are much brighter than they appear
in this image Machine quilted. Size: 18 x 21. For another quilter's interpretation of the
twisted log cabin, see Lilo's
gallery.
"Twisted and a Little Bit Crazy," a single crazy-pieced
version of the same block, completed 1998. I had originally intended this to be the back of
"still sane," but I liked it too much to put on the back, so I did a plain black back on both
quilts. Since I'd crazy-pieced it, it only seemed fitting to crazy-quilt it using some of the
fancy stitches on my Pfaff 7550. Size: 21 x
23. Machine quilted. Detail    Another
Detail
"Draconis Vulgaris," completed 1998. I used some of
my tiny scraps, fused and stitched with various threads, including cotton, rayon, and metallic.
Used some of the the "Snippets" techniques. The quilt is based on a
photo of a flower that grew in my moth
er's garden. Detail Size: 11 x 14.
"Summer" and "Azalea", two miniature landscapes based on projects in
the book Beyond the Horizon by Valerie Hearder. Size: 6 x 9. Completed 1997.
"Mtet in Blue,", completed December 1996. This was inspired by a
fractal image produced by the freeware
fractint program. (Click on
that link to download a copy of the program for yourself!) A thumbnail of the fractal image
appears next to the quilt thumbnail. I enlarged the image and printed it on several sheets of
paper, which I taped together. That formed the basis of the pattern. The fabric includes some
scraps contributed by guild-members and "uglies night" participants, and I bought fabric to fill
in the gaps. I now have a wonderful stash
of blues! The quilt was mostly hand-appliqued using a temporary paper foundation, to which
pieces and sections were basted. Pieces were appliqued only onto other pieces, not to the
foundation. I tried to machine-piece one section of it, and didn't like the way it came out, so
shifted to the hand-applique method (see if you can find the machine-pieced part!) It was hand
quilted, using a combination of cotton, rayon, and metallic threads. Size: 30" x 40".See the fractal image, a detail , and a closer detail.
"Floating Island" was completed May, 1996. It was an experiment with the
watercolor style, and used a kit of 200 two-inch squares. If you look at the background, you'll
recognize the sky fabric from the cat quilt below. The quilt was included in my guild's annual
show, and was completed just in time. Machine pieced, hand quilted. Size: 28" x 28".Also available are a de tail, and a closer detail.
"My Cats"
is my first
quilt, based on a pattern in an old issue of Quilt World magazine. It is machine- and
hand-appliqued, and hand quilted. The window shades are made from left-over fabric that I had
used to make roman shades for our former house (in Colorado). Size: 33" x
21" The cats have their own page.
When I first started quilting, my mom sent me a box of fabric from my grandmother's
stash. Some of these fabrics had been used for clothing my grandmother had made for my mom in
the 30's; some of them had been used in (or intended for) some of my grandmother's projects.
Anyway, I used Electric Quilt to play with
various possibilities, and came up with this. It is
machine pieced and hand
quilted. The only new fabric is the bright red used in the borders. See a detail. Size: 35" x 43"
I made this baby quilt for the son of my friend Lily. I used
Electric Quilt to design it also. It is
machine pieced and quilted. Size: 32" x 40"Quilting Links
Main Quilting Page The jumping-off point for all things quiltedQuilting at about.com Lots of interesting articles.
Planet Patchwork The home of the Virtual Quilt
Quiltart Home Page Check out the Gallery of art quilts!
Bryer Patch Studio Caryl Bryer Fallert
Computer Quilting Made Easy
Fabric Links
Textile Art A lovely selection of hand-dyed fabrics.Wearables
This crazy quilt vest was made entirely from scraps: most of the scraps are
from pieces cut off altered pants (I usually cut several inches off of pants-legs in order to
make them fit). It was embellished with perle cotton and metallic thread. You can also see the back of the vest.
This log cabin vest was the project that got me interested in quilting. I
saw a pattern in a crafts magazine, and made my own version. Part of what spurs me on to make my
own vests is that I can't buy vests made by anyone else: they are just too large. So, I use two
well-worn patterns that I have altered to fit.
This is a reversible vest. The leftmost vest was made
from scraps left over from the rightmost vest, whos red side is in a bargello pattern, and whose
blue side is crazy-pieced.
Dyed and Painted Fabric
Needle Felting
This piece is about 9 x 12 inches, and is based on a photo of flowers in my mother's garden. It's hand needlefelted with wool on a base of acrylic "craft felt." It has a brown batik binding, which can be seen in the lower part of the photo (it didn't quite fit on the scanner), and is matted and framed (will get the framed version posted soon!)
Left: Another 9 x 12 piece, "Felt blossoms." This one is also based on a photo from my parents' yard.Right: Red spot of Jupiter, about 8 x 7.
Weaving
I am a beginning weaver, and am primarily interested in tapestry. This is my first tapestry (and
the only finished one). It was made on a 4-harness table loom. I designed the cartoon on the
computer, using CorelDRAW. Size: 18" x 26" Miscellaneous Links
All images (not including the linked YouTube and This is True material) copyright 2008 by Lois Frankel. All rights reserved. Last updated February 22, 2008
