Carolyn's Quote: "Each Flower A Soul"

"Each flower is a soul blossoming in nature."

In March, Alice and I took a class from Lenore Crawford who mixes painted fabric with cotton prints.  After the class, I was not happy with my piece.  It was based on a photo I took of a vivid pink ocotillo bloom at Ghost Ranch, the home of Georgia O’Keefe.  So when thinking about our theme “quote,” I decided to cut it up and make a close-up version of a modern looking cluster of flowers popping up from the ground. 

As a flower-lover, I found a lovely quote by Gernard de Nerval that suited my intention for this design.  Nerval was an 18^th century writer, poet, essayist and translator.  As a friend of Victor Hugo, he translated Goethe’s Faust into French, thereby introducing the French to a variety of German Romantic authors.  He thus became a major figure in French romanticism.

I used pieces of my hand-painted flower that had previously been bonded onto 100% cotton and fused the pieces into a design using Wonder Under.  Each piece was layered onto a piece of dark blue batik. I thought the design needed some other colors, so I free-hand cut and painted a yellow batik flower and green batik for greenery.  The small yellow flower above the leaf is a piece from a Kaffe Fassett fabric.  The quote was digitally printed on a yellow background.  I made a sandwich of the design by adding cotton batting,  a layer of 12”x12” Timtex and a backing fabric.  Then I machine quilted the design through 6 or 7 layers with Aurifil thread on my domestic Bernina machine.