Passages - I Can Fly

Quilting Arts magazine recently had a reader's challenge to submit a 10 x 10 quilt based on the theme "Passages".  Since my submission was not selected  - they chose 12 out of 125 - I guess I can share it here.  Those odds are pretty low, so I don't feel too bad about not being chosen; I'm happy with how it turned out, regardless.  My quilt is a reflective piece about my daughter moving away from home to become an independent adult. When she was growing up, she used to say, "Guess what?" and I'd say, "What?"  Her reply would be "I can fly!"  I have no idea where that came from.  But thinking about this passage brought the memory back.  The text is done with thermofax screens of notes she wrote while away at college.  The bird and wings imagery complete the idea of nurturing a child until they are ready to fly on their own.  I look forward to seeing the challenge finalists' quilts in the October/November issue of Quilting Arts..

 

 

This piece is made on rusted cotton fabric with gelatin plate printing in the background, thermofax screen printing, Transfer Artist Paper (original photograph of robin and babies), and is machine quilted.

How Do You View Time?

This was the topic of the latest postcard exchange, and above is a finished card. I started with a piece of rusted fabric cut into 3 8 1/2" x 11" sheets that I ironed onto freezer paper so that I could print text on them.  I created a page of sayings about time in various fonts, and then in order to get  3 cards out of each sheet with the printing reading horizontally on each, I turned the text into an image that I could shrink and copy with the opposite orientation on one end of the page, as shown in the pictures below.

The next step was to stencil with a clock stencil that contained several different clock images. Then I cut the large sheets into 3, 4 x 6 " pieces.  The focal point for the cards is an image from a book of African designs, one that I felt was representative of infinitiy, having no real beginning or end.  That image was screen printed in the center of each piece.  After fusing each piece to timtex, I machine stitched the central image.

  A card stock backing was fused to the back of the cards and they were finished off with a machine satin stitch on the edges.  Then mailed off to the rest of the swap group!