Quilting: Traditional and Artistic

Note that I didn't title this entry "Quilting: Traditional or Artistic" or "Quilting: Traditional versus Artistic." There is room for both in the world of patchwork and quilting just as one quilter can have the inclination and skills/creativity for both. Enjoyment comes from both forms, although the enjoyment is different, at least it is for me. There's an element of joy when each block of a traditional quilt goes together just so. And there is the happy moment when a series of traditional blocks put up on a design wall begin to say "quilt." But once the blocks are finished, let's face it, a lot of what comes next is...well...(dare I say it?) rather boring. Sewing block to block to form rows and then sewing rows to rows to form the quilt. And then comes the quilting which can go on for a very long time. Not that there isn't satisfaction and tactile enjoyment from doing the quilting, whether by machine or by hand. But if you quilt a bed-sized quilt by machine, you end up doing a lot of wrestling unless you have a long-arm machine, which most of us don't have. And if you quilt the bed quilt by hand, it can sometimes take months if not over a year, depending on what else is happening in your life--and how good your eyes are for quilting while watching the telly!

Making an art quilt is almost all joy, start to finish. Trying new techniques or embellishments, adding surface design, can be very exciting. It can also be somewhat disappointing as every experiment brings the risk of not quite going the way you thought it would. See the piece above? Well yesterday after I got out the batting for the Provence quilt and the backing fabric, I discovered I didn't have enough of either, so that put paid to that project for a wee while. What to do? I haven't made an art quilt in a few months and so decided to make a small one and perhaps apply a technique that works quite well for my friend Marion who lives in Norfolk, England. She makes the art quilt, machine-quilts it, and then paints it, finding that wonderful new patterns emerge where parts of the quilted fabric takes the paint differently.

I took a piece of batting approximately 11 inches square and put a piece of pale blue polyester napkin on top of it on which I had put some patterns using purple and chartreuse transfer crayon some time back. This formed the background. Next I took a piece of fabric Marion had hand-dyed a yellow green and then had painted over with black paint. I cut that into strips and arranged the strips so that there was a base across the bottom and some vertical columns coming up from that base. Then I took a piece of fabric I had marbled a few years ago during a play date with my Bethesda quilter friend Floris. (We were trying out the "shaving cream marbling process" which was novel but, in the long run, we thought wasn't worth the trouble.) The marbled fabric was lavender-purple with yellow swirls. I cut that up into various shapes and began laying the shapes and some of the waste on top of the piece. I created what looked to me like a couple of surreal "flame trees" as well as a few flame-shaped or smoke-column-shaped smaller pieces here and there.

All this looked pretty good but struck me as too much of the same colours: lavender and chartreuse. They also were close to the same values except for the fainter patterns on the background piece. How to add another colour to spark the piece up? This is where Marion's technique of painting after quilting would come in. So I carefully transported the piece to the sewing machine, threaded it up with a pale variegated thread with similar colours to what was in the piece, and quilted a meander pattern all over the piece, catching the loose edges of all the shapes as I went along (nothing was pinned down). For the paint, I decided on a metallic copper which I at first tried stamping onto the quilt top. This didn't look very good so I just took a small foam brush and brushed paint onto the surface of the quilt in vertical strokes. Suddenly I thought, "Hang on! Why did I go to the trouble of marbling that fabric and then using it to make "flame trees" if I'm going to paint over it?" So at the last moment, I changed my mind and left the two "flame trees" unpainted (except for the extreme right side of the one on the right. I did do a bit of accent painting with the sharp edge of the foam brush around the chartreuse swirls in these trees.

I left the piece to dry overnight and then trimmed it to make it more rectangular and vertical in orientation. I am now thinking about how I like it. I'm not sure. What do you think?