Virginia A. Spiegel

Logo by Jeanelle McCall

Where do I start?  I thought I would do a little fundraiser – - two Tuesdays, ten totes, maybe raise $1000 for the American Cancer Society.

Well!  Thanks to generous sponsors and donors, we now have over thirty totes listed with the actual number of sponsored totes in-progress approaching fifty. Here are the latest totes added to the list:

Fabric To Dye For (Frieda Anderson)
Collect Your Dreams (Diana Welte)
Share Your Art! (Franki Kohler)
Think Pink (Sandra Baker)
Studio Time (Peggy Schroder)

A list of all the totes to date with a brief description and links is here.

More information about this Rust-Text Collection tote.

I’m Tweeting about basically nothing except ToteTuesday at least from now until February 2, so that is a good place to find all the latest news.

More information about how ToteTuesday Works:
1. Totes
2. Contents
3. Bidding

Last, but certainly not least, I must express my special thanks to Peggy Schroder.  She is working overtime to make ToteTuesday a success.  She volunteered (and is doing a stunning job) to track all the individual donations for ToteTuesday as well as to contact fiber-related businesses who she knows would like to support our fundraiser. She is conceptualizing many wonderful themed totes featuring these donations, taking enticing photos of the contents for the auction, and making plans to ship everything out to the lucky winners,  Oh, and did I mention she is also doing her own series of “Have A Heart” totes with artwork and other donations from the “Big Names” in the art quilt world?  She is a tote-diva!

Water, Tree, Rock and Sky:  Boundary Waters
White cotton cloth, textile paint, oil paint, black duck cloth, polyester cloth,velvet fabric, tree warp, silk organza inkjet printed with artist’s photos, rice paper, ink, foil, rayon thread.

The  Meet SAQA’s Artists:  20th Anniversary Trunk Show, including my artwork above, will be traveling by request to Studio Art Quilt Associate’s regions throughout SAQA’s 20th Anniversary celebration.  Each artist was asked to create a piece of artwork that showcased a process, technique, or style that represents her/his artistic voice. Of course, I wanted to show my layering of materials, use of typography, and the Boundary Waters as subject matter.

Each small artwork was placed in under 12″ square mat with an 8″ square opening.   Vou Best brought many of the artworks to my residency Open Studio in February in Texas and you can see the presentation of each artwork in the photo below:

I’m holding Jamie Fingal’s artwork with Vou Best, 20th Anniversary Trunk Show Curator
Photo by Jamie Fingal

A portion of Meet SAQA’s Artists will be selected to become a study collection at the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. IQSC is devoted to the preservation, study and exhibition of quilts and to sharing its resources with the public. The donation of the selected works from the “Meet SAQA’s Artists” project will create an important archive representing both SAQA and the artists who are working in the studio art quilt medium in 2009 – a historical benchmark to assist future historians, academics, writers and others tracking the art quilt movement.