Sara's Translate

When I first thought of translation I thought of the conversion of one language to another or from one symbol to another. My next thought was translational symmetry - the movement of an object from one place to the next without rotation. This concept reminded me of a design exercise I did when in a 2d design class when we were given sheets of printed r's and e's and were asked to create a composition-I decided to work with a simple shape. I started out making a freezer paper stencil and using Shive paint sticks on black fabric,That done, I decided that I wanted something with more contrast and I had just finished a workshop with Esterita Austin so I decided to use Mistyfuse on fabric and use fusible appliqué . I cut out 3 sizes of small circles out of the fused fabric using my accuquilt die cutter, I arranged lines of translated red circles and liked the result. I went back in with green circles on an angle to add visual interest.

I decided to quilt this using "matchstick" quilting that I had seen on some modern quilts - closely spaced lines that are roughly but not quite parallel. A 12 inch quilt seems like a much better place to try ou a technique than a larger quilt - especially one that is so time consuming! I'm not sure I like the effect enough to use on an entire quilt but I may use it in some areas of quilting where my overall quilting is fairly dense. I was glad to be able to try it out .