External Forces

My FiberWorks group has embarked on a new project called "External Forces" that we plan to do once a month. Each member was challenged to come up with a theme or motif for the year and each month we will apply some technique or idea to that theme. Each member put 3 techniques or ideas into a bag and everyone drew one for the first month.

My theme is "Suns". One of my favorite shows on TV is Sunday Morning on CBS. It has been on for over thirty years, each week from 9-10:30 AM. It is a magazine of sorts with segments on the news, art, entertainment, etc. The current host is Jane Pauley, who recently took over from Charles Osgood who retired after many years. He was preceded by Charles Karault.




 There is their official logo sun, which is on at the beginning of the show.

Between each segment is a different sun, often in the same theme as the segment. If you go to their website and scroll all the way down, you will see more info about the suns. I often wondered where they came from. Did they have a staff that was so incredibly talented? Well, I'm sure they do, but a lot of them are sent in by viewers. You can send in a photo and if they like it, you will get a letter saying that they may use it at some time. They don't say when and you don't get credit. Most of the suns have faces.

The card that I picked was "fussy cutting", apparently put in by one of our more traditional quilters. It means cutting out some section of a fabric for the ideal shape you are looking for. You might cut a little tree out of a landscape print, or you might want the exact same design in each section of a nine-patch. You get the drift.

I almost always now use my hand-dyed and/or surface design fabric in my work so  I had to go through my many piles of commercial prints to find circles, which I wanted for the center of my sun face and found these two batiks in my stash.

And here are my suns. The pieces were fused on and then edged in machine buttonhole stitch. I machine stitched the faces on, using free motion satin stitch on the first and free motion straight stitch on the other.

Our pieces are all to be 8 inches square. I plan to use blues from my six gradations of this bright blue for all my backgrounds. If I like them all when finished I will put them together into a small wall quilt called, of course, Sunday Morning. Who knows, maybe I'll send in some pictures and be on TV!!