Meet Our Members: Kris Khan

Meet our Member, Kris Khan! We got lucky this year and got two presidents for the price of one. Kris and Stephanie are both leading our guild for 2017. Kris is mother to triplets and was a nurse for 30 years. She moved to Omaha in 2014, shortly after she began her career as a fiber artist. Here is more about Kris!

How long have you been a member of OMQG? I joined in 2014 shortly after arriving in Omaha.

Tell us about the first quilt you made I have been sewing since the age of 8. I decided to try quilting in 2002 when my arm was in a cast and I was looking for something I could sew one-handed. I figured I could make a quilt block. I did, and in fact made 144 blocks and created my first quilt. It was a queen sized pinwheel quilt and is still one of my favorites.

How would you describe your style? What are your influences? My style is kind of modern, kind of artsy, and sometimes traditional. I love highly saturated colors, which are not always in style with modern quilting. I do my best work when I just improvise and shoot from the hip. Others call this "listening to their inner voice" but for me it feels like slapping things together.....yet it works. My influences are nature and abstract art. I especially love the art of Wolf Kahn. Nancy Crow shaped the way I look at and approach quilting, since I took a week-long workshop with her in 2006 or so.

What is your proudest quilting moment? I created a quilt called "Spectrum," in 2012, which hangs outside my studio door at Hot Shops. It is an abstract piece made of 4,096 1" squares in an abstract design, mounted on 4 32" x 32" panels. I displayed it at the Bayou City Art Festival in Houston, Texas in my booth which faced a pond. Literally hundreds of people visited the booth and said they had seen Spectrum across the pond and had to see it close up. That was cool. Not that anyone has bought it.....

What inspires you right now? I am at a point in my life right now where I need some comfort, and that usually comes from mindless sewing -- i.e., making things that require little thought, like disappearing 9 patches and things like that. I am also inspired by the political climate and have in mind some text-based art quilts...

What do you do when you aren’t quilting? I read voraciously (about 100 books a year), I garden, and hang out with friends and family.

Any recommendations? OBSERVE. When you are in nature, observe the lines of trees and branches, the colors of moss and rocks and flowers, the lines of birds in flight, the subtle changes in colors of the sky. Go to art museums. Look at graffiti. Sift through junk and old posters and textiles at antique stores. And LEARN.

What is your best advice for a beginning quilter? Just do it. Listen to / read a little bit of advice and then just do it. There is so much information and so many "tips" out there that you can become paralyzed. Just start by starting.

Where can people see more of your work? My website or come by my studio at Hot Shops Art Center, studio 321 at 1301 Nicholas Street in Omaha.