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:

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