Friday, September 19, 2008

Mini Art Quilts

This isn't really new work, but the first time I've shown it online.  The Northern Star Quilter's Guild, of which I am a member, puts on a fabulous quilt show every May.  One of the exhibits this year was a showing of mini art quilts made by members of a small art quilt group that meets each month before the regular meeting.  The members decided to make  small quilts, either 6"square or 8" square illustrating a technique that had been shown or talked about during the year. I just got my two pieces back today and thought I would share them here.

The first one, Ginkoes, illustrates discharge stamping.  I used a Hot Potato stamp, a Clorox Bleach pen, and hand dyed fabrics, some by Cherrywood Fabrics and some of my own. I liked the surprise of what color would show through.  I kept the quilting to a bare minimum.



The second one, Lichen, was a lot of fun to do.  I took Tyvek paper and painted it dark green, cut it into rectangles, then put them between parchment paper and ironed with a hot iron to shrink and distort it.  I mixed three different colors of metallic pigment powders with acrylic medium and brushed that on top in certain areas. I stitched them to black felt that had been fused to Peltex, then went all around the edges with three different colors of metallic threads, joining the pieces at some points.  The finishing touch was gluing down some fancy beads and pearls in similar colors.  I am very fond of this piece, but it only looks good up close.  From a distance it just looks very dark.

These pieces were attached to white card stock and lettered beautifully by Debbie Bein.  They were attached to black ribbon and suspended in front of black fabric, so that the white squares seems to be floating.  It was a very dynamic  display and go a lot of favorable attention.

4 comments:

Sherryl said...

Lovely piece. Tyvek is so much fun to work with.

Karen Newman Fridy said...

Love them both! And what a great way to present them

laura west kong said...

Very cute! Thanks for sharing those.

Vivien Zepf said...

I saw these at the show. Your lichen piece really does evoke the 3D-ness (is that even a word?)of lichen. Very cool.