"Mountain Retreat" 2013 Cindy Grisdela

“Mountain Retreat” 2013 Cindy Grisdela

I finished my 12″ x 12″ donation quilt for the 2013 Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) annual auction just under the wire! Of course that meant I had to FedEx it to get to the collection person in time–the receive by deadline is Saturday.

This piece is called Mountain Retreat, and it’s part of a series of quilts I’ve done using an improvisationally pieced band set with asymmetrical borders and enhanced with free-motion stitching for texture. Most of them have a house theme. You can see another one in the series, Neighborhood, here.

I like the purple and green combination in the borders–it just made me think of mountains! Working improvisationally, you never know exactly how a piece is going to turn out–that’s the beauty of it for me–it’s always something new! For this one I knew I wanted to go with this series and I had some pieces that were left over from other project, so I just starting cutting and sewing and gradually the composition came together. Each decision influences the next in terms of color and shape. I like to say it’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box to guide me!

The auction begins for the first section on September 9, 2013 at 2 PM. Usually there are about three sections in the auction–I won’t know until later in the summer which section my quilt will be in, but there is always plenty of wonderful work to choose from!

All of the quilts in the auction are 12″ square. This is the fifth year I’ve contributed a piece to this cause. SAQA’s mission is to promote quilts as art and I have benefited tremendously from my participation in this group, so it’s important to me to give something back.

For more information about the auction and to see the donated quilts, please visit www.saqa.com and click on 2013 Benefit Auction under “News and Events.”

And while you’re on the SAQA site, be sure and take a look at the new Virtual Gallery I curated there called “Images of Summer” using images from nearly 20 of our talented Professional Artist Members. You can see the gallery here.