Puzzled at the Mainstay Gallery

This month, I decided to enter a piece in the exhibit, "Puzzled," at the Mainstay Gallery in town. I picked up a "puzzle" piece - a piece of paper with black and white forms on it which resembled a quilt. There were two other "puzzles" but they didn't appeal to me as this one did because I used to make quilts.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and then it came to me that a quilt is like a book - in both you are fitting things together. In the middle of the night, I wrote this little poem - "A quilt is fabric joined with care. A book is words, with none to spare."

Next, I copied the puzzle piece and then cut out the black shapes. I traced these on pieces of fabric I had once used for quilts. After I glued them on, I worked on the words. I used the title and the first lines of my teenage novel, Loulane Lambert's Lists for Life.

The photos show the progression. The opening is March 6 - all the artists get to "place" their piece in the puzzle. Even though I'm not an artist, I really enjoyed the creativity that went into this.