Yellow Tulips

Tulips are such elegant flowers, simple in shapes and in so many wonderful colours. And since Art Deco is very simplified, it was a perfect match for my personal challenge, tulips. Looking through images from my garden, I settled on the one I used in an earlier challenge, LOVE, and used it as a template for raw edge applique, with hand dyed cotton.
As a background, I used something that reminded me of radioes from the 1930s, freehand cut and pieced commersial fabrics, on top of pale green linen.
 

 The quilting in the background is simply straight lines, the tulips are free hand machinequilted, with French knots.

Der Hexenstieg

The Witches Trail

Gabriele Bach - Der Hexenstieg

In this quilt I wanted to try many different possibilities to use lettering. In the end I used only three, the size and my design decisions limited the number.

Der Hexenstieg - detail

Mainly I wanted to use handwriting, and that reminds me on diaries. Years ago I walked the Witches Trail  in the Harz mountains, 100 km in four days. This adventure I wanted to record in the quilt.

The handwriting gives information about the Harz mountains. Since ever Harz and witches belong together, in Walpurgisnight the witches fly to the Brocken, the highest mountain in Harz, and dance there.

The little witch I used in the quilt, leads the trail. In the big block of my quilt I appliqued the form of the Harz and embroidered the Witches Trail. The trees are typical for the Harz.

Der Hexenstieg - detail

At the light fabric on the left side I wrote the names of the main points from the trail, it is similar to the trail markers.

The main colours of the Harz are blue and green and the orange witch is just the right complement to it.

Der Hexenstieg - detail

Balancing Act

I have always been interested in the functions of the left and right sides of the brain. The left side deals with logic, analysis, sequencing and time. It is the area for speech, mathematics, science and language. It deals with the details of every aspect of life and prefers structure and orderliness.

The right side of the brain deals with emotion and the big picture. It is the area for creativity, intuition, colour, shape and pattern. It has no sense of time or true language but rather uses a visual form of communication. Its connections are more random and spontaneous rather than sequencial. It is not bound by rules or regulations but is more free-wheeling in its processes.

While working on this quilt I tried to use both halves of my brain. The left side was the leader in planning the content of the quilt. It did the research, collected images and information, looked at colour palettes and set up a time line. The right brain was then asked to present a whole, complete image based on this information. Then it was back to the left brain to develop a work sequence, techniques and approaches. The right brain stepped in whenever there was an overall design decision to be made.

Being a very left brain dominant person, it was an interesting experience trying to work in this intuitive way.

In the quilt, the left brain is represented by the background while the right brain is represented by the areas of strong colour. The concept was to have both areas work together to create a sense of balance.

Hand printed and dyed fabric, surface design, appliqué, machine quilted, hand stitched

Resonance

My approach to an art piece is usually a psychological or philosophical one. I am trying to convey a thought or concept in a visual way. For this theme of leaving our mark, after much thought I felt that the belief that I wanted to express was that by our very existence we leave a mark. Just as dropping a pebble into a pond causes concentric ripples to flow outward in all directions, our presence also creates ripples of  influence in the world around us.

If we now think of dropping many pebbles into a pond the ripples spread out and begin to overlap thus causing the patterns to merge and change. Similarly although we send out our particular pattern of energy, so do others and these patterns encounter one another and form new patterns. So we may effect change in other people in ways that we will never know but they will also effect changes in us. Thus we build our families, our communities, our societies and our world.

For Buddhists the bohdi leaf is a symbol of the spirit, as Buddha was sitting under a bohdi tree when he reached enlightenment. I have used an abstracted image of a bohdi leaf to represent the spirit and the echo quilting to convey the idea of the energy waves that we emit and receive as we journey through our life.

I have used a technique of layering colours of silk and then slashing down to reveal the under layers to convey the idea that our influence exists on many levels, physical, emotional, intellectual and psychological.

The materials are Indian silk and commercial cotton fabric.