Time is flying by and the Quilt Show is coming up! Eeek! We are all scrambling to get everything ready. I spoke in an earlier post about sharing a retail space downtown with Bob and Helene Davis. I will have ralli quilts, lots of molas, Indian textiles, kilims, African beads, textile stamps and much more. In this post, I would like to describe a bit of what Bob and Helene will have.
We are members of the same fiber art group here in Paducah. Bob and Helene owned a building downtown where they set up last year for the quilt show. Helene has a monstrous commercial fabric stash which she no longer uses because she now hand dyes and prints her own fabric which will also be available for sale during the show. Last year they had a wonderful display of their quilts, some of which will also be back this year.
Bob started a new site for Helene's work where he describes her stash:
"Fabricholics will recognize this scene. This is a small part of Helene's "Stash" that we sold at 3 cents a gram. If you are wondering, that is about $2.50- $3.50 a 42 inch yard. Despite the quantity of fabric that walked out the door we have barely made a dent. All those Hoffman's and John Kaldor's and Nancy Crow's and Island Batik's and .. and.. Most of the pieces are at least 1/2 yard."
Helene's hand dyed fabric take up a whole wall which Bob calls the Wall of Color, "Of course Helene's hand dyed fabric will be available for purchase. Here is the "Wall of Color" of fat eights. We had a lot of customers who were doing appliqué or fused work that needed to get just a bit of the right color for their work."
They will also carry Helene's shibori this year, a new offering:
Helene is definitely our local dye Queen. She toils away in her dungeon, turning out one masterpiece after another. Bob also has his share of talent: he quilts, has boxes and boxes and boxes of ceramic beads he's made, and recently started a new design process that is wonderful! He's taken a stained glass drawing program and tweaked it to his own uses, making it perfect for translating images into potential quilt designs. Most of his images are portraits of local artists and people, although he has done some gorgeous landscapes as well. Here are a couple examples:
Bob Davis, self-portrait
Me, looking 20 years younger!Bob has kindly removed our wrinkles and imperfections. We all love him for this! He talks more about facial lines and what they mean on his webpage. We'll have more in-depth articles on both Helene and Bob in the future here on Fiber Focus. For now, we invite those of you who can, to come and visit our space during the quilt show. Hopefully, you will also buy, buy, buy!!!!! (heh, heh) See you there!
April 21-26
10 AM-5 PM
212 Broadway in Paducah, Kentucky
10 AM-5 PM
212 Broadway in Paducah, Kentucky
Hooray, Rachel, for this wonderful post on Helene and Bob. So glad I discovered it (via Helene, of course). What an interesting blog! I'm going to put a link on it from mine.
ReplyDeleteHave fun vending with Bob during the show and I hope you both sell a ton of your goodies! Wish I could be there.