Art & Quilts & Cameras & Such

The dining room table needed to be cleared for tomorrow’s Easter feast… 4 quilt tops in various stages lay calmly on that table awaiting my sandwiching skills. Today was the day. The weather cooperated so I could spray-baste the backing to the batting, and then the quilt top to the backed batting. Ahhhh……. Four new quilts ready for quilting – my favorite part of it all.

Somehow, it’s the quilting that makes the piece for me. I love the color selections, the designing mode, and the mixing and matching that goes on as I’m piecing a top. But the quilting is the final statement – the quilting cements the design in more ways than simple the technical “sandwiching” of sewing the three layers together.

I recently received my last completed piece back from a college show. I had yet to photograph this piece and was anxious to try my new digital camera to see how well it could/would capture art quilts.

This particular piece took lots of time working from a tiny sketch seen on-line of the subject and turning it into my design. Then choosing to use batik to express the theme – and having to do color separations so that I could put the piece in the dye baths in proper order. This is/was only my second batik – the first was much smaller, maybe 1/3 the size of this one.

My concern was all that open space behind the bird – lots of orange in the design. I knew the quilting would ‘cut’ that space, but I also knew the quilting had to be just right to divide the space into interesting segments and while maintaining the continuity of the background. Once it was completed, I was very pleased with the results of my quilting over the surface. I added a few glass & metal beads as embellishments – water droplets falling from the heron’s beak. The lower edge of the quilt has a full strip of similar beads attached. Now I wish I had used blues and greens for this design…so I tried that in PhotoShop and the results are below. The quilt measures 19” wide x 42” long – including the beads.