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"Just Breathe" is the title of this Yoga frog wall quilt. I found the makings for it in the bag of scraps I was given, shown below. This was one of our challenges in our Fiber Art Bee. A year ago we each brought in a quart-size bag filled with fabrics, trims, and embellishments. We passed the bags left, and each now held the bag from which we were to make a small project. We could add to our pile of materials as needed. I'd guesstimate that 90% of my projects came from the bag, and I used up about 75% of the contenst. It was fun to try and figure out what to do with some of the things in there!
You can see the batik fabric scraps and the frog motifs, but there were also pink lace pieces, silk flowers and leaves, beads and skeins of embroidery floss. It looked pretty daunting when I spilled the contents out on the floor. Not only did I "find" the makings of the wall quilt in the bag, but also this lovely bride art doll.
Meet Violet Rose, the blushing bride. She, too, is created from a lot of the contents of the challenge bag. Her petal skirt, necklace, veil, yo-yo trim on her flower belt- it all came from the bag. Too lovely for words, that Violet Rose!
Here's her back view, complete with a pocket-full of dreams and her name tag. Violet Rose is an example of an Art Warrior doll which I learned to make in a class at Goatfeathers Studio with instructors Celeste Beck and Merri McKenzie. You can see a whole party full of these dolls in this earlier post. They are great fun to make, and nearly create themselves from assorted scraps- as you can see from Violet Rose's humble beginnings!
Are you a fan of challenges? As I look back on the past year, I've participated in four or five, plus I have another in the works. So apparently I am a fan.
We've completed a year-long book study in our Fiber Arts Bee using Deborah Boschert's book "Art Quilt Collage". As part of our study, we were challenged to make a collage quilt incorporating things we learned during the study. We'll be revealing our pieces at an upcoming meeting this week, but I thought I'd share my piece with you now, along with some of the elements inspired by the study.
The first thing I did was to look up the term "collage" in a dictionary. I know when I'm seeing one, but needed to have a word description to solidify the concept in my head. A working definition is this: an artistic composition made by securing pieces of various materials to a larger surface; an assemblage of pieces that make a new whole. Well, ok. That sums it up for me.
The inspiration for this collage quilt was a topographical map of a little palm hammock in Florida. I used a palm design made by sun printing, assorted hand-dyed and hand-stamped fabric bits, hand embroidery and machine free-motion stitches to represent the map markings and the flora of the hammock. I completed the piece with a simple facing finish that was new to me (here's a link for it if you're interested). I thought the flat-edge finish on this piece was preferable to an applied binding.
I also included a personal symbol, which we were encouraged to identify during the book study. It's a design element that turns up repeatedly in our work. Mine is something I now call a "splat flower". It's a free-form petaled flower, and in this case it's one I had stamped with acrylic paint using a hand-carved stamp. You can see another of my splat flowers in the previous post of stamped fabrics here.
There's more to come with the challenges in the Fiber Art Bee. We will reveal a second challenge at the same meeting, and I'll share that with you very soon.
