Golden Tulips

Our challenge Extreme combined with my personal one, Tulips could give many solutions. But tulips tends to grow very long stems even after they have been put in a vase, so I decided to focus on that. My tulips have extremely long stems compared to the heads. I also wanted the stems to weave together, not standing straight, and as I drew them, they suddenly became brother at the bottom.
For once, I also wanted to work with golden foil - so golden tulips. But I needed a focal-point, so I put in one tulip, bowing down to the viewer.
This done in my sketchbook, I had to figure out how to interpret this in fabric. I decided to quilt the whole piece first, then paint in the stems with fabric paint, glue and foil for the heads. The big one was red fabric bonded on before the gold foil was put on. And a little quilt finish just as a hint. I have not tried to make realistic tulips, just a suggestion.

and some close ups:

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.

Tulips in green

I love tulips. They have been blooming here in Bergen, Norway, since the spring of 1596. There even is a tulip that only exist in Norway, named Tulipa norvegica. So it was natural for me to make my personal theme for 2015 Tulips. And the group-challenge this time was green.

I am so fascinated by variety in the shapes of the flowers, they are so elegant.

I decided to use this sage-green fabric I had hand-dyed, as my background.

I made squares with oil-sticks, and in these frames I embroidered the tulip-heads with free-hand machine stitching, and added some stems and leaves. Then I filled the background with machine and hand quilting.

All in green, apart from the flowers which have a mix of black and very dark green thread.

Some close-ups:

For Galskapen heng i det grøne, og Eplet er raudt utan synd

When the challenge came, I thought this was just my thing. I love letters and writing, and often try to incorporate it in my work. So I looked through my sketchbooks for inspiration, and at once found my quote. It is from a poem by the Norwegian author Jon Fosse and in Norwegian it goes: "For galskapen heng i det grøne, og eplet er raudt utan synd". Translated to English it says something like: "For the madness is hanging in the green, and the apple is red without sinn". I had already a rough idea of how to interpret it, and for a long time, I had wanted to try to embroider lettering in the style of Lorina Bulwer. I had found somewhere on the internet a tutorial of how tom make letters like hers easy, and decided to use it this time.

What colours to use were easy to pick, I needle-turn appliqued  the apple, machine quilted the piece simple with free straight lines before I embroidered the lettering and finished it all with some simple hand-stitches. And framed it all with the colour of the apple.

Because the quote is Norwegian, as my native language is, I decided to keep both the text in the quilt and the title in Norwegian.

and a close up:

Jokulsarlon

My first thought when I red WILD was Tiger. My next idea was the Scandinavien equivalent, lynx. But I changed my mind, and wanted to go more abstract. So I decided to revisit a theme I have played with before. In Iceland, there is a lake  filled with floating mini-icebergs from the nearby glacier. It is called Jokulsarlon, which means "glacial river lagoon". The lines, colour and texture are really fascinating. I painted some fabric in this wonderful green-blue kind of colour of the glacier, cut it up and pieced it together again, and layered it with a polyester kind of fiber, usually used in scrapboking, some of which were manipulated with heat.

I quilted it all with parallell lines and framed it with a simple black binding.

 And some close ups: 

Under the surface - a long time ago

 With this theme, I decided - literally - to go under the surface. When archeologists dig, they relate to the different layers the soil has, and can place the different artifacts according to these layers. In 1905, two archeologists started digging in the Oseberg burial mound at Slagen in Tunsberg, and found one of the finest finds to have survived the Viking age. 
This treasure has inspired me in so many ways, so this is my tribute to what our ancestors left us. The green grass-grown mound above the surface, and the burial-ship with all its beautiful content under.

Cotton painted with fabric paint and gesso, fused applique, machine and hand quilted and some french knots.

My Space Your Space Our Space

My first thought when I saw our theme SPACE, were of those wonderful pictures NASA and others have given us from the outer space. Just like some of our hand dyed fabrics, especially some of the ice and snow dyed ones. But of course I needed something more.
In April, my daughter and I had a weekend in London and Manchester. She wanted to go to the Backstreet Boys concert in Manchester, and I wanted to visit the Harry Potter experience at Leavesden.
Well, we went together on both places. And of course, there were a bit of shopping!
Walking in the streets of London, the idea suddenly came to me. This was her space, and mine, and we had them together, so this trip ended as our space.
I decided to use photos I had taken at the concert and during the studio-tour. Transferred them to fabric, cut the in strips and bonded them to some fusible wadding. Unfortunately, the photo transfers were not so bright as I wanted, so I put a piece of blue organza on top to give it a bit more colour. I then finished this part with some stitching on top, running stitches and french knots.
The background fabric I had chosen, emphasizes the colours of the photos. For the quilting, I went for machine-embroidered lettering, inspired by Laura Kemshall. Because of the size, 15"x15", I could not use too bold letters, but I think I found a font that suits the size. And to give this background a bit more life, I put in some running stitches in some of the letters with the turquoise from the pictures.
Instead of bonding the photo-part to the background, I wanted it to have more depth, so I finished it with a blind fold and attached it loosely with stitches from the back.

and a close-up:

Love Tulip

When I put out this challenge, I called it maybe trite but when I started working on it, it really ended up as a challenge for me. While I was looking in my sketchbooks, and my heart for ideas, I came across a journal-quilt I made last year. It was worked with spraying through stencils with some tulips. And I really love tulips with their many shapes patterns and colours. And not to forget it's history. The first tulip in Norway, bloomed in the garden of an old pharmacy here in the center of Bergen more than 400 years ago.
So I had an idea, but how to interpret it. By spraying and stenciling I managed to get a piece of cloth I liked, but I also needed a focus. I went to one of my other great love: Letters, in all it's sizes and fonts. And how they can be decorative as well as have a meaning. So I stenciled a big L on top of it all and put the rest of the letters for love as a decoration on it. I hand quilted the visible tulips, machine-quilted the background and appliqued a photo-transfer of a tulip from my garden as a finishing touch.

And some close-ups:

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:

Escape

At first glance, this was an interesting theme. But when I started working with it, I had problems how to solve it as a quilt. I decided to go abstract, focusing on this:
Escape = an act of breaking free from confinement or control.
We live in a world where, in certain environments, being "out of the box" is not always a good thing.  You have to fit in. So, I've tried to show this by breaking it all down to squares - in rows - with military precision, except for the one escaping and blooming. Because these people are sometimes regarded like    a weed, like a dandelion. They are strong, beautiful, full of colour, they have freed themselves from the rules of the garden and pop up wherever they want!

Silence in a heartbeat

Since audio is a great part of my profession, I really like this theme. At first glimpse it looked so easy, but as I started to work it became quite a challenge. To analyze "the sound of silence" as a professional, both sound and silence are not visual, we don't see them, we hear them. So how to visualize? If you go into a "dead room", where no sound exist at all, you start to hear your own heartbeat, and the rush of blood in your veins. I didn't want to make a dead room as a background, and using word -  what language to choose? But music-notation is the same all over the world, so I chose the sign for the musician to take a general rest, (in french they call it silence), and put it as a background. I chose grey on a white background, because I wanted something neutral. On this I appliqued the sound-wave of the heartbeat in read in raw edge applique, to represent the blood. The echo-quilting represent this "sound" as it bounces around in the body, fading from red towards pink and grey.

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

Looking for inspiration

I had an idea for Memories, but it didn't work the way I wanted, so I went to my fabrics and thread to find inspiration. This fragment of fabric from past work, together with the silk embroidery-thread from a forgotten century - maybe they will play a part?

Adventurer

As artists, we all leave our mark, and I was working with monoprint when this challenge came up. And doing monoprinting is a way of making marks. I chose this image of Saga Oseberg at sea, with wind in her sail. I have been working a bit with the original Viking ship Oseberg since my final piece for my City of Guilds course, I just love this ship. Saga Oseberg is an exact copy of the original, made with old tools, no modern machines. Even the Graffiti carvings on the old one is copied, and the quilted boat shape in the background is one of these carvings.
Since my last two pieces are green, I decided Not to use green in this one. I decided to go black and white on this, with a little contrast colour. Another of our old Viking boats, Gokstad, had shields in black and yellow, so I ended with this golden yellow. Hand-quilted ship, and machine-quilted background. Greta.