Fiber Collage Fun...

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.