New Quilt in the Making

Since the first of the year, I have been working on a technique for making art quilts which I got from reading an article in the Autumn 2006 edition of Quilting Arts Magazine. My first experiment was quite instructive because I made it too representational, added too many design elements, and used too many colours in the painting. The result was that it ended up looking like a picture I might have painted when I was 7 or 8 years old. The final straw was when I painted the sun in the sky and the paint ran down in one little trickle so that the sun became a rather misshapen and wobbly balloon!

Last Friday I started over, attempting to learn from my mistakes. The first photo shows the initial two phases. I placed old patterned fabric I am not likely to use in a simple but pleasing pattern, laying them on top of a piece of backing. Then I added two prints I made from a lino block which I had carved. It's supposed to be a Druid priest but looks more like a priestess. I stamped the design onto a light piece of fabric back when I was doing my City and Guilds course. The block on the left was done first and the one on the right was the second print I made while the paint was still wet on the stamp. I had painted the paint onto the stamp and so I got a streaky effect rather like a wood grain. Next, I pinned these elements in place, took the piece to the machine, and free-motion quilted them down with a variety of quilting patterns.

In the finished piece, pictured second, you can see that I have painted over the quilting which makes the "hills and valleys" show up better. I touched up a few of the elements the next day, after the first layer of paint had dried. My aim this time was to lighten the blue and the green, add a blush of colour to the horizontal band at the top, and then to add a few details with a small brush (outlines around the four orbs and wave-like patterns on the horizontal band at the top). I envision this as an artifact, something left by a previous civilisation discovered centuries later by archaeologists.

My next task will be to shape it slightly irregularly and finish the edges so that it looks more like a tablet than a quilt, and then to "float" it on a quilted background that looks like an ancient wall.