The inspiration and process for making my "Stone Love" quilt

In 2012 at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham UK I attended a class called "Digital imagery in stitched textiles" with Sandra Meech.

The aim of the course was to make the connection between the images we take with our cameras for inspiration, painted surfaces we do for fun and their important connection to fabric and stitch through collage.

For this class we were asked to bring several black-and-white photocopies, different saturated, on cartridge paper, of something we would like to to use and work with during the class and also one or two pages with our personal writing, describing the theme of our choice.

As Sandra said "The use of personal imagery and writing is a wonderful way of expressing a personal theme".

As I love stones and stonewalls my choice/theme was a very old church ruin, Karnbo church ruin, situated very near where I live.

I took a lot of photos of the ruin, above are just a few of them. I also wrote an A4 page by hand describing when it was built (during the 1200 hundred century) rebuilt etc. With lots of photo copies of the church ruin and the handwritten text we started to paint every page with diluted acrylic paints. Brusho, Koh-i-noor (bright water-based dyes used for painting on paper) and procion dyes also work very well.

As a background for the collage one white A4 copy paper was folded vertical  and one was folded horizontal.

5 - 7 pieces of paper in different widths were then torn from the painted theme photocopies and personal handwriting and then glued to the white copy papers. Our collages where after that photographed for the computer and printed on fabrics.

Left:
Vertical collage on paper and
below:
The paper collage printed on fabric.

Landscape collage printed on paper.

The same paper collage printed on fabric.

As another exercise I tore paper strips from my black-and-white photocopies and also a little piece from   a painted paper and made a collage.

The collage on the right hand side was then my inspiration for the Latitude Quilt´s  March quilt with the theme LOVE.

I called my quilt "Stone Love"

Sandra Meech has written several books. In my possession I have her three latest.

Connecting art to stitch. 2009. ISBN: 978-1-9063-8810-2

Connecting design to stitch. 2012. ISBN: 978-1-60705-622-5

Creative quilts. Unlock your creativity with design classes and techniques. 

2013. ISBN: 978-1-849941-112

Those books can not be to warmly recommended.

Enjoy

Ann-Mari