Pineapple Emerging

 I decided to continue with my method of designing in PaintShop Pro with the aim of producing something very bright and rather abstract. I eventually settled on a very simplified design of a pineapple set against a background of kiwi fruit cross sections. I love fresh pineapple, but am allergic to it and get a more extreme reaction to it every time I eat it.

I started with a simple drawing of a pineapple which I scanned in and then I found a good picture of kiwi fruit. I manipulated the kiwi fruit picture and then changed the colour of the pineapple and the leaves to differentiate it from the background. 

 I used TAP for the lettering on my last quilt, but I have never used it for a whole quilt and I have never had to match and join sections of a picture onto fabric. It’s quite difficult and I did mess it up a bit. I have since worked out how to crop accurate section for printing and to join them together with masking tape before ironing it all on to the fabric in one big go.

My intention was to do some dense quilting over the background in a light colour to knock it back and make the pineapple pop out, but this did not work as effectively as I had hoped. To rectify this I had to reinforce the stitched black outline of the pineapple with a black pen and then go over the background with a pearl-white Markal stick. If I'd had time to practice I would have faded out the background before printing it.

Reverse view

T is for Tulip

For me with this theme the challenge was not how to interpret it but which technic to use.

As I had made several journal quilts with the tulip theme in the past year including the quilt for our love theme I decided to use this flower again for the last quilt of the year and of this cycle.

I decided to use my big tulip thermofax screen and add the word tulip on the quilt. While trying to decide which technic I should use for the letters I decided that as a greeting to all the current members of our group I would write the word tulip in each of our languages (french, german, english, swedish, norwegian and russian). Since the russian language uses another alphabet than ours stamping was excluded. I decided against stitching and choose writing with a fabric pen. As I had screenprinted a golden tulip on a dark purple background and already decided to use a yellow background for the quilt I used a purple pen on the same yellow fabric than the background.

To add some more sparkle I also fused a golden metallic foil T on another purple piece of fabric.



I used a tulip stamp and gold paint on the background. The tulips were free motion quilted, then I stippled the background in between of the stamped tulips.

The yellow fabric with the words was layered on more purple fabric for contrast and I appliquéed all the pieces with a zig-zag stitch. Initially I had planed to use hand stitching for the appliqué but I finally tought that it didn't look good with the free motion quilted background.

Commercial hand dyed cotton fabric

Polyester batting

Polyester thread

Screen printing, fused metallic foil, hand writing with fabric pen

Free motion quilting

Machine raw edge appliqué 

Sabine

Hugs and Kisses

Love encompasses so much of life and motivates us in many ways. Everyday we use symbols to tell people we love them in texts, letters and notes. For this challenge the plan was to use the symbols and colours of love to create fabric that would convey the same message.  

The traditional colour of love is red, this together with it's complementary colour set the colour scheme and then stylised imagery was added.

These presented challenges, as a way of creating a stencil with small crosses and circles, various stamps for trialling and making a grid for the stamping had to be devised. Who said love was easy?

It all went well until the heart motif turned out to be upside down once the excess fabric was cut away. The choice was then leave the quilt in this state or cut it away and redesign with the left over bits of fabric. The perfect grid was a thing of the past,  but it has character and imperfection, just like love.

Sur le cou-de-pied

I started by analyzing Balance, and several ideas sprang to life, but one settled. When I was younger, classical ballet was a great part of my life. And the most important part of ballet is balance. In every movement you have to find the balance of your body.
Next, I had to find how to express this, my first thought was to use an image of my old battered shoes hanging on the wall. But they did not express much balance. But this position, "Sur le cou-de-pied", pins the body to the ground when it is in balance.
I decided to go for stenciling this time, and made two stencils out of freezer-paper, one of the feet and one of the shoes. I used acrylic paint with textile medium. Then I added shadow with Paint-sticks, quilted the shoes and filled the background with ballet-terms. I finished it all with some hand-stitching to suggest the floor.

 And some close ups:

TBCBEM

Memories, how do you chose one? I couldn't.
So I decided to try and represent them all using colour and then  explore the way memories are formed, reinforced and then lost through fragmentation. Research of scanning electron microscope photos and the explanation of the formation of memories  gave me the starting point for the quilting patterns.
The colours: walking through long grass, misty mornings, joy, pain, all can be captured through colour.
The strips and dots are memories, some overlapping, some being reinforced and some disintegrating. The quilting well that's the science and then the recall of events. Hanging from the bottom are the ends of the binding cord with a knot, so I won't forget.
And that weird title, that happened when my daughter, a psychologist, walked in and saw the quilt and said that's the bio cognitive basis or explanation of memory It's unwieldy but the perfect name and it stuck.
The quilt is made from cottons, some commercial some hand dyed, Super soft polyester wadding, cord, beads and 100 weight invasafil thread. The background is pieced and the surface fabrics stitched down with straight stitch close to the edge. this will allow the fabrics to fray over time much as memories do.

 

Margy

The Lost Garden

I had to go far back to find my memory, from my early childhood. We had a cabin back then, out of the city, with a garden full of flowers and berry-bushes, which my grandmother planted in the 1930s. There also were a lake near by, where we used to go bathing with our row-boat. @I decided to go abstract, seeing the flowers in the front, and an overview with lake and forrest in the background, as if seen from above.
Mono-printed and painted calico, machine-quilted and hand-embroidered.
And some close-ups:

Greta

Hope

 

                                                     Every Single Day
                                               Hope by Margy Johnson

There are many things that happen every single day. Headlines and the news come at us continuously and every now and then you find a positive article, plants grow, birds fly, life continues with it's joys and pains. I wanted to capture hope; its what the flowers represent, all that potential and hope encased in a small seed.
 It was interesting scouring the news papers to find positive headlines and pictures to build up the first layer of the quilt and create a record for that period of time. Matching up fabrics and then threads, all had to balance and co-ordinate to complete the picture

 

 

"OMNIPRESENT" - Deborah Wirsu

The concept of something that occurs, or that we do 'every single day' proved a great challenge for me.  At first, so many different ideas raced through my mind - from daily activities or events to concepts such as birth and death, growth and decline, which occur every day, somewhere, sometime.

After discussing this theme with a friend, and tossing around several possibilities, eventually the concept of 'omnipresence' settled in my mind. Omnipresence, to me, represents 'presence everywhere, at all times' - therefore - every single day.

My friend (of the aforementioned discussion) has long wanted me to create a quilt based around the Fu Dogs (Lion Dogs) that guard the entrance to many Asian temples and monasteries, but after weeks of shuffling paper and designs, nothing was falling into place that satisfied me. In the end, after sifting through and seeking inspiration in photos of my Asian travels, I arrived at the idea of using Buddha to represent 'every day', an omnipresent being, rather than for any religious interpretation. Wherever there is a statue or representation of Buddha, there is the suggestion that Buddha is present everywhere - simultaneously all-knowing and all-being.

Somewhere along the design process, I found myself drifting towards Manga style, which is a very unusual direction for me. However, I found that the simplified, cartoon style allowed me to represent the simplicity and tranquillity that I wished for this Buddha.

The traditional 'Om' symbol in the background is used to represent the physical, mental and conscious worlds. For me, as a musician, it also resonates simply as a sound or vibration - a part of one’s being.

The piece is worked in cotton fabrics with raw edge machine appliqué, using satin stitch and free-motion edge stitch. The background is free-motion quilted.The piece measures 15" x 15".

My other quilts can be seen on my blog.