After finishing the large “Lollipop Flower” quilt, I realized I wanted to keep working with it. I also had a large wall in my dining room that I wanted to fill. So, I came up with the idea of filling the space with several small pieces, instead of one large one. Thus, I could take my little motif and put it through it’s paces.
Another issue that had me stymied for awhile was the compulsion I had to fill all the spaces with stitching. Why was I creating wonderful hand dyed fabric with luscious texture, just to cover it up with the stitching? Well, for one reason – so the quilt would lie flat while hanging, right? So, if I could come up with another way to hang the quilts, I would be able to be purposeful with my stitching. Enter Tommy Fitsimmons, whose blog I’ve been reading for quite awhile now. She often stretches her quilts over a wooden frame and staples them to the back. Problem solved, I’ll mount my quilts like an artist would mount their canvas.
So, I used my computer to block out the sizes I wanted to create. Then I pulled together a limited palette and started by re-creating my initial little blue composition in a slightly larger format (10″ x 20″) : see #1 on photo above (click to enlarge if you’d like).
I’m quilting with simple, obviously hand-done lines and loving the look. I then moved to a large (18″ x 18″) square and repeated the flower in different ways: see the #2’s on the photo above
Then I started to work with a circle and line where the line was continuous, rather than comprised of squares: see the #3’s on the photo above
And then I changed the proportion of circle to line: see the #4’s on the photo above.
Finally, I deconstructed some more, creating the last few, unlabelled pieces.
The neat thing about all this is that it went relatively quickly, and I was able to get the entire large piece finished and mounted in a relatively quick fashion. Idea to execution took less than a month. I loved the finished result, and I was still enthused about how I was working! BTW, I call this piece “Once in a Blue Moon” because of the little piece in the upper right hand corner with the big blue circle.
I’m sorry these pix are not great, it’s quite hard to get pictures of these in situ:
The fun thing with these is because they’re abstract, and mounted on the frames, I can quickly change the orientation of each piece and swap out same size pieces until I like the overall composition. It’s like I get to keep playing on the design wall, but it’s actually the installation! Because these pieces were something different than the quilts I’ve made in the past, i wanted to have a different label for them. So I decided to call them quArt. I used the term for a week or two before I wrote it down, and then realized that my original spelling “quart” was actually a different word! No WONDER no other art quilter hadn’t yet used the term. But, I loved the term, and my friends who saw this piece also loved it, so I decided to change the spelling to quArt and hope that people would make the term rhyme with “heart” not “wart”!
0 Responses