This is a substitute quilt for the first one I posted. I wasn’t happy with that one, since
technically speaking, it wasn’t truly an “art quilt.” For one thing, I didn’t
originate the design; it was a traditional block pattern
Recently my cousin Carol Harrison, an artist who often works in
watercolors, posted one of her paintings on Facebook. I fell in love with this lovely serene
painting, and I thought, “Maybe I could replicate that design in fabric.” I emailed Carol and received her permission
to use her image.
I was determined to use only fabrics in my stash, many of
which are batiks and were backed with fusible already. I used as a base a blue ombre with graduated
shades of blue. Then I began the process of selecting the fabrics for the other
elements in the painting. These I cut
out free hand with scissors or two different rotary cutter blades. As I finished one layer, then I overlapped
the fabric strips to make the next layer.
All went well until I got to the water, specifically, the shadows of the
trees in the water. Green shadows look
fine in the painting, but green fabrics just didn’t look like shadows us. So I switched to blue shadows,
using various batiks. But still they
didn’t look shadow-like to me.
Sue Benner taught one workshop I’ve attended, and her method
was to use multiple strips of fabric to compose her landscape quilts. I went to her website and studied how she
treated water and shadows. Following her
example, I overlaid tiny cuts from other blue batiks onto the shadow shapes.
This looked much better.
After the quilt was finished, I machine quilted, changing
thread colors often, chiefly sewing down the fused edges and then doing some echo
quilting. After all the quilting was
done, I thread-painted the red-brown grasses at the bottom of the quilt.
I’m happier with this quilt!
Carol’s painting is below. Beneath is, a detail of the water and the shadows in the quilt.
