Sunday, June 14, 2009

Be the change

How is it Sunday night?

This is the quilt square I designed for the Regional Center for Women in the Arts' art quilt "The Fabric of Peace." We were all to design a 12" square and send it off. It will all be sewn together as a large collaborative piece. I love the idea of collaborative art pieces - all of those voices chiming in on the same topic in visual conversation.

When I agreed to this I hadn't really thought that I'm quite a poser as a quilter- maybe "poser" is a bit stern but I've only actually made one baby-sized quilt.

The letter said we were all to "design the enclosed section of the quilt." Since I am not an art-maker who "designs" first, I was a bit perplexed. I finally threw caution to the wind and wound up following my usual art creating by the seat of my pants routine.

I sewed disparate bits of fabric on the base fabric, gessoed over it, color glazed it and wrote into it. I was pleased with the metaphorical nature of the piece at this point and began to rustle about for some kind of imagery that would tie the whole thing together. Admittedly, the bird is a bit expected. It came from a truly lovely book of stencils called Stencil101 by Ed Roth. It was fun to then paint around the stencil and then sew around the painted areas (just use a heavy duty needle in your machine).

This was one of those situations where I said "yes, OK. I'll participate in this project" without giving it a ton of thought and I would have chickened out if I'd thought about it, but I'm glad I didn't think about it.

If you follow that line of logic.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is really fabulous, Diana! What a wonderful contribution you made. Really, really nice.

Kelly said...

Beautiful work Diana. I am really enjoying working through your blog. Melissa over at RED TAPE mentioned you have a book coming out in October. Would you be able to contact me via email as I have a question for you in those regards. you can contact me at ksun underscore 1999 at yahoo dot com. (all together of coarse). Only if you have a moment. I would greatly appreciate it.

Unknown said...

I love this....It really is wonderful.

Mixed Media Martyr said...

This quilt square is gorgeous!!!