Judi Warren Blaydon

Judi Warren Blaydon

 Icon: Saint Gertrude/

Patron Saint of Gardeners

When I was in art school somebody wrote this graffiti over the back door to an apartment building that art students rented:

Art is Hard

Judi Warren Blaydon works as hard at art as anybody I know. She does it with grace and style, but she takes her art---all art---as seriously as possible.

Judi Warren Blaydon

The Mountain and the Magic: A Color Not Forgotten

68 1/2" x 86"

When you hear her talk about art you realize how important it is to her and how much she thinks about it.

She's a great art teacher and a great quilt teacher. Her job, as she sees it,  is to teach quiltmakers "to make a quilt that is not derivative, a quilt in which he or she assumes sole responsibility."

In her new book Collage + Cloth = Quilt she talks about quiltmakers who "aspire to pose their own questions and look to no one but themselves for the answers. She also writes about "Ideas [that] can evolve from something as casual as a ballpoint pen sketch…or as elusive as [an image from] the mind's eye or on the bedroom ceiling at 3:45 in the morning."

But she also knows how some of us struggle to get those ideas at 3:45 in the morning or anytime. The new book offers a system for design :

"An alternative strategy is to use the collage process to invent a design composition that will become the inspiration, the diagram, and the map of a quilt that will be all yours."

Favorite photos

Fractured into a collage

Blueprint for a quilt

Hiaku by Claudia Alldredge, one of Judi's students

Judi

The book is full of photo collages and cloth compositions from her students, carefully laying out the design process.

Boatyard #1 by Laure Campbell

36" x 27"

Which Way is Up? by Sally B. Davis

See more about the book here:

http://www.ctpubblog.com/2010/04/07/sneak-peek-collageclothquilt-by-judi-warren-blaydon/ 

And read more about Judi here:

http://www.ctpub.com/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=494

Amsterdam One by Ann Rhode