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

Cosmos

“Space” is Latitude Quilts’ latest challenge.  This idea came from a workshop that I took from Susan Carlson about fabric collage.  The process was to take fabrics and cut out shapes that would be used to enhance a drawn picture on a piece of muslin.  As you build your creation, you use glue to tack down the pieces and once it is finished, the entire piece has a tulle overlay which is machine stitched down.  At the time of the workshop, the theme had must been announced and I thought this technique perfectly matched the theme.  So, my piece is simple called “Cosmos”

Cosmos

Cosmos_detail 1

Cosmos_detail 2

Katie Pidgeon

Techniques:    fabric collage, tulle overlay

Materials:       commercial fabric, tulle, beads and sequins

Date:               May 31, 2014

Never stop learning something new!!

They say that learning should never end, well, I'm a firm believer in that.  Just the other day, I took a fantastic workshop.  Our teacher, Susan Carlson from Maine was inspirational and in the May reveal, you will see what I completed.  Susan is a trained graphic artist and when she discovered the love of fabric, magic happens.  Her technique is fabric collage without using fusible web, rather the power of school glue.  Please visit her website and never stop learning.

http://www.susancarlson.com/

Photo taken on Tuesday April 15, 2014 at the York Heritage Quilters Guild meeting.  Toronto, Canada

Every Single Day

When I red the theme for this quilt I wondered how to interpret it. Thinking of reading the newspaper every day with all the catastrophes around the world, happening all the time, I thought of the four elements and what they causes such as  fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, floods etc. Trying to dive a little bit deeper into this I started, as usual, to search for my glasses and there I had my idea for the quilt, not such a serious subject field though. I do not know how much time I spend every day searching for my glasses, but it is a lot. Reading glasses, sun glasses and progressive glasses!! I made a collage with letters as I at the beginning had thought of  newspaper. In my possession I also had an antique prosthetic eye (made 1890-1940), which fitted so well into the theme.

 

"Where are my Glasses?" by Ann-Mari Franzén

Materials: cotton fabrics and threads, Ink Jet Printing Fabric Cotton Sheets and a thin cotton/polyester wadding. 

Techniques: machine pieced and machine and hand quilted.

Date: March 31, 2013