Is this quilt art?

So I made some more progress on my art quilt.  First, I decided rather than "This quilt is art" I'm going with "is this quilt art".  I took the diane-shiko block and cut out the word "IS", satin stitched around it, covered it with water soluble stabilizer and quilted using three different colors of thread.  So that leaves this block:

I liked it so much, I decided rather than mixed technique, I would do all the blocks like this.  However, I think for the words QUILT and ART I am going to try to suspend them inside the cut out space.  We'll see how it goes when I get there.

Today I used a tutorial Diane Gaudynski posted to try a new design called Celtic Bubbles. This was a really fun design to create, although my circles are just not perfect!  I need to work on the spacing between my echoing lines (the one thing I noticed is my stitch length is getting to be very consistent- that's exciting!)  I think the best way to do this is to doodle more, my drawing isn't very good either...

This will be the background for the word "this", which I will hopefully get done this week.

I need to figure out when the guild art quilt challenge is due.

I'm thinking maybe I should do some hand embroidery with yarn on it, just to give it more color (or at very least satin stitch around the letters in darker thread to hide the quilting that had to come up to the fabric to attach the floating threads), and possibly dye the quilt.  I don't know yet

Mario quilt still just needs binding, but I have to take out my embroidery machine to get a label on it, so I'm not very motivated to finish.

Just a bit of quilting

Had a wonderful weekend this week- the World Figure Skating Championships!  The event is not covered by US TV unless you have a super high tier cable package in some markets (not ours) that carries Universal Sports, so I watched on Latvian and Russian TV. I learned the Lativan word for oops is ups, prounced "oops-ah".

URGH! Blogger just ate my recap of the skating. It was a great recap, but I'm not typing it again- check out icenetwork.com for more.

Even though I spent a lot of time watching TV, Saturday I DID quilt the Mario quilt!  It took about 4-5 hours, I think.  I just did a big stipple, not wanting to take away from the design, but needing to quilt this batting no more than 5 inches apart.  I was worried it was going to be really hard, after reading the quilt-along blog, but after the first square it turned out it wasn't too bad at all.

Here is a peak at the back.  The batik was picked because Kevin thought it had a Bowser's castle vibe.

Today I started a new project.  We have an art quilt challenge at guild.  I've decided to make a quilt that is self-referential to the fact that it is art, since I'm not sure I really make art.  I mean- if it says it is art, can you argue with that? Quilt's don't lie.  So the quilt will be put together quilt as you go, and each block will have a word of "This quilt is art" in a different technique.  I read in Quilting arts magazine about cutting away a space and then sewing strings across it so they are suspended and that sounded really cool, so this block is the background for the word "is" which will be done in that technique.  I wanted to get it done today, but a neighbor had surgery, so we took her kids ice skating for 3 1/2 hours to give her some quiet time.

The really cool thing is that Diane-shiko is one of the blocks I did for the snowflake quilt, an early one.  Looking at THIS block, I can see without a doubt, I'm getting better.  White on white hides mistakes, and there are tons, but the circles are definitely more even.