Today in art: Sunprints, Shibori, and Grape Leaves

Tomorrow, I'll be at a reception for the opening of an art quilt show in which I'm involved, Five Fiber Friends:

Gallery art director Kate Paranteau invited us fiber artists, as part of our show, to make pillows to put on her gallery's sofas. 

So I'm making pillows.  And food for our reception.  More on the food later.

Here's one of the pillows:

The central motif on this one is a simple sunprint made with Pebeo Setacolor paints, a few confetti stars, and a few pieces of arborvitae.

When we Five Fiber Friends were hanging our show, Kate liked to tell us how the pieces we hung together could "tell stories" to one another.

If this pillow were telling a story, it would go something like, "On a quiet night, as the stars were just starting to come out the air was still warm enough to hold the smell of the sunlight on the pine needles."

Or, what about the jazz standard, "Quiet Night of Quiet Stars?"

I like that story.  Here are a couple of other sunprints that continue it:

I gave these two sunprints each two borders:  narrow ones of white linen and wider ones of shibori-dyed Pima cotton.  I like what the shibori does for the sunprints, and vice versa.  As Kate would see it, they're telling the same story. Or different versions of the same story.

I used shibori fabric for the backs of the pillows, too:

In addition to these three sunprints, I'm also going to include  another pillow I made, this one with a central knitted motif:

If this one told a story, it would be, "There was once a twining vine, and it tried and it tried and it reached and it reached until it reached every place it tried to go."

I know a vine like that.

In between making these pillows, I've also been working on some finger-food type snacks for tomorrow's reception.  Somebody else was already bringing cheese and crackers, a veggie platter, and a fruit platter.  What was left?  Nothing healthy that I could think of, except...

I do have all these grape leaves growing on the garage...(lovely, aren't they?)

...so I suppose I could make stuffed grape leaves.

They're a lot of work, but they're exceptional:  my recipe has wonderful ingredients, pine nuts and dill and currants in addition to the rice.  They're so much better than those served in restaurants, which feature mainly rice and certainly not pine nuts or currants.  I can't take credit for my recipe, which is from a cookbook.  All I do is follow it.

So I did:

Grape leaves drying off after their one-minute trip through boiling water

Look at the yummy ingredients in that stuffing!

 Finally they get cooked in a low slow bath of olive oil, lemon juice and water.

They're gonna be good!   And so is the reception.  So please come!  But if you can't come, the exhibit will be up until September 21.