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