Scandinavian Runes & Greek Letters

During my 2 years as a member of this group, this theme "Lettering" was the most challenging for me, even if I earlier had made 2 quilts containing letters, Every Day and Marks.

The idea of letting the Scandinavian runes and the Greek letters come together in a quilt come to me
as I often pass a couple of  rune stones when out walking in Sweden (Mariefred) and in Greece (Messinia) where I often pass a small "Monument" with Greek text reminding of the war.

For the Greek theme I chose to use different shapes of urns and fig leaves together with Greek lettering.

For the Scandinavian runes I just embroidered letters by hand saying, Latitude Quilts November Two Thousand Fourteen and after that 3 extra letters (X,Y and M) just in order to fill up the piece.

The Greek background fabric is a Procion dyed linen whole cloth stamped and stenciled with gold and white textile colors, discharged paste and oil paint sticks. The urns and fig leaves are machine embroidered with Metallic and Rayon threads.

The runes are hand embroidered on a piece of sturdy cotton fabric painted with a gold acrylic paint.

The main colors of blue, white and gold was chosen with the colors of the Swedish and Greek flags in mind, even if they do not exactly correspond to the true blue and yellow colors of the Swedish flag and the blue color of the Greek flag.

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: