Love of art quilts binds Hot Springs Village women

— There’s a common thread that binds together three women from Hot Springs Village: their love of making art quilts.

Darlene Garstecki, Michelle Jones and Ruth Anne Yax have art quilts in the Studio Art Quilt Associates Inc. Regional Exhibition, Connecting Threads, on display through April 28 in the Main Library Gallery of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 401 President Clinton Ave. in Little Rock. The show includes 23 quilts from 15 artists from Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama.

The exhibition is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

The three women met when each joined the Hot Springs Village Quilt Guild.

Garstecki, who moved to the Village approximately 12 years ago from Michigan, is a past president of the local quilt guild.

“I quilted for 25 years back in Michigan,” she said. “I worked at a historical facility, and they sent me to a quilt show. I fell in love with quilting and turned around and quit my job so I could quilt.

“I continued to quilt traditionally until I began to experiment with textiles and other things. Now, there is a nucleus in the quilt guild that does art quilts. We call ourselves contemporary textile artists.”

Garstecki’s quilt The Lotus is on display.

“It’s entirely pieced,” she said. “I painted my own fabric and used beading, free-motion embroidery, along with several other techniques. It took about 10 months to complete.”

Garstecki said she and her husband travel a lot, and The Lotus was inspired by the lotus she saw in China. This same quilt has appeared in other quilt shows as well, including the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas.

Garstecki’s quilts have also been featured in various books.

Jones, who is a regional co-representative of the Studio Art Quilt Associates Inc., moved to Hot Springs Village from Colorado.

“I was retired after we moved here,” she said with a laugh.

“Now I work full time at a bank. It’s a new career for me. My last full-time job was teaching at Colorado State University.

“I used to do garment construction back in the ’90s. I made wearable art. I like unusual designs.”

She has two pieces in the art quilt show: Watching Over Sofia and Still Life.

Jones said Still Life is based on a photograph her husband took.

“It has lots and lots of thread in it,” she said of the quilt, “about 60 or 70 different colors. I happened to have a huge amount of thread on hand.

“You take a piece of fabric, and it has a very dull look, but as you work on it, it just comes to life. I had the color photo right beside me, and as I worked, I chose the colors I would use. I only use rayon thread; it has so much more sheen to it.”

Jones said Watching Over Sofia is based on a reproduction of an icon her husband brought home from Bulgaria years ago.

“The hardest part of it was her face,” Jones said. “I used different fabrics for the piece.”

Jones has shown her art quilts in Hot Springs, as well as at the American Quilter’s Society’s show in Paducah, Ky.

Yax moved to Hot Springs Village eight years ago from Cincinnati. She, too, was a traditional quilter but joined a group that concentrated on contemporary quilts and fiber arts.

“They taught me so much,” she said.

She has two art quilts in the Little Rock show - Relationships and Shamrocks. She has also shown her quilts at the International Quilt Festival in Houston and at shows in Cincinnati.

“I do [quilting] for pleasure,” she said.

“It’s my outlet. I don’t use patterns. I make my own. I get inspired by things I see. I’m a little more contemporary than many, a little edgy.I love to dye and paint, to appliqué. I combine as many different techniques as I can.”

She said the idea for Relationships came from a Dover Press coloring book.

“It’s geometric,” she said. “I enlarged the page from the coloring book, painted it on fabric, did the beading and made cord to go around it. I did a lot of thread-painting, too. It does have some machine quilting in it.

“Then I embellished it. It’s all mine. It shows how relationships can be broken and mended.”

Yax said Shamrocks is hand-painted.

“It was in the Houston show,” she said. “I used a lot of multimedia techniques, a lot of thread-painting. I took a white cloth and then painted it using thread-painting.

“Almost everything I do is for sale. I usually just put my contact information on my work and no prices. I had a quilt in a Houston show, and a few weeks later, a man called and said he wanted to buy it. Turns out he was an astronaut. That really pleased me.”

The Studio Arts Quilt Associates Inc. is a nonprofit organization that promotes the art quilt worldwide.

The organization defines an art quilt as “a contemporary artwork exploring and expressing aesthetic concerns common to the whole range of visual arts, which retains, through materials or technique, a clear relationship to the folk-art quilt from which it descends.”

Tri-Lakes, Pages 52 on 03/22/2012

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