I have been very absent here of late, after this quilt took on a life of its own and I very much feared I would never meet today’s deadline on the theme of Change/ Transformation. I hope to post more about it soon but some of my thinking behind this piece and and the quilts of my fellow Endeavourers are being revealed today on The Endeavourers blog so please visit to see all the different interpretations.
In the meantime, I wish you a very Happy May Day!
Janine @ Rainbow Hare :)
Yesterday, February 1st was the first Reveal date for The Endeavourers, our new art quilt group, and our theme for this quarter was ‘Nature’. My full post for the quilt I made for this challenge, including both my thoughts and the making process, can be found on The Endeavourers blog so I am just posting a summary here.
It is called ‘Don’t Poke the Bear’ and uses the bear (which I hope looks like the world) to represent Nature and is based on the idea that if you poke a bear, or cause sufficient disturbance to the natural balance of the environment, it can be expected to roar and fight back.
The tear is for the suffering and loss of individuals, species and habitats that is occurring in the interim and with a special sadness for the state of the oceans, which are filling with plastics at a shocking and unsustainable rate. A particular inspiration for this aspect of my quilt was the short video below, which is the saddest I have ever seen.
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/albatross-trailer/#trailer
I felt very reluctant to contribute such a sad quilt and blog post to our first art quilt reveal, which is an exciting and joyful event, but my hope is that perhaps by making this quilt and sharing the video I will add a small voice to all those who are campaigning for a dramatic reduction in the use of unnecessary, and especially disposable single use plastics.
I hope that you will visit my fellow Endeavourers. Their response to the Nature theme has been amazing and you can find a wonderful variety of beautiful, inspiring and uplifting art quilts on our group blog.
Janine @ Rainbow Hare
Today is the final Four in Art reveal and, firstly, I would like to say thank you to all the Four in Art members. Sewing along with you in these Art Quilt challenges has been an inspiration and an education and I wish you all well with your future projects :)
Our theme for this year is ‘Light’ and the sub-theme for this quarter is ‘Illumination’. Our aim, as always, is: “…to break out of the usual gridded experience and try a new concept, free of structure or preconception, moving the boundaries of our own skills forward in both concept and technique”.
Although I chose ‘Illumination’ as the sub-theme, I had no idea what to make. I kept thinking about illuminated letters, but that didn’t seem to me to have much to do with this year’s main theme of ‘Light’.
Then I considered light bulbs and that, circuitously (no pun intended), led me to consider light bulb moments and eventually to ponder on Archimedes, who was taking a bath when he realised that a body submerged in water displaces its own volume and ‘took to the streets naked, so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to dress, crying “Eureka!” (Greek: “εὕρηκα, heúrēka!”, meaning “I have found [it]!”‘ (Wikipedia). Or so the story goes.
This brought me back to the possibility of an illuminated letter – E for Eureka – illustrating a light bulb moment or a moment of illumination.
Once I had the image in my mind of an elegant golden letter with a lightbulb and a person in a bath, I came to the practical problem of how to actually sew that into a quilt. My go-to would ordinarily be appliqué but I’m not keen on raw edge appliqué and I thought if I tried to needle-turn a metallic fabric to appliqué a gilded letter with both thick and very thin strokes it would, most likely, end up a terrible mess! And then I had a small eureka moment myself when I realised I could use paint in place of tiny/awkward appliqué pieces! So I investigated fabric paints and luckily came upon Pebeo Setacolor Opaque fabric paints.
Details of how I painted the letter can be found in my ‘Time and Tide’ post.
I’m considering making some more of these as an occasional long-term project and, one day, turning them into an ‘Unexpected Alphabet Quilt’…
Please visit the other members of Four in Art and see their interpretations of our Final theme.
Bette Ayers Camilla Cathro Catherine Chisholm
Elizabeth Eastmond Nancy Myers Rachel Riley Simone Bradford
Janine @ Rainbow Hare
