Quilt Challenge

Well, I was going to write about something else, but yesterday I got an email from Leah Day that congratulated me on being a finalist in her Transformation Quilt Challenge.   Needless to say I am stoked!

Leah Day is one of the quilters I follow – her tutorials, approach to quilting and her free motion quilting designs have been most inspiring.  So when she announced the challenge to make a 9” by 11” quilt around the theme transformation and using at least 5 of her quilting designs, I thought I would give it a shot.

 

The adage to beginning writers is to write about what you know – I would say that’s true for art quilters as well.  I am a forester by profession and I love trees, forests, leaves, flowers.  I have now made several quilts using leaves (Photos 1 -3), so I decided to express the wonder of the ever changing seasons as displayed by changing leaf colors.

 

Photo 1: Spring Leaf Dance.  The background material is fabric I painted.

Photo 2: Maple Leaf Runner.  Experimenting with Ellen Lindner's double reverse applique technique.

Photo 3: Persistence.  Made in an online class with Ellen Lindner.

Another quilter whom I admire is Robbi Joy Eklow.  In her book Free-Expression she has a tutorial on making a type of quilt called a puzzle quilt, which consists of overlapping objects.  The overlap is a different color from the two (or more) objects.  Instead of vases and bowls she shows, I elected to use leaves.  

So I started by making one quilt using commercial fabrics (Photo 4). The leaves are aspen leaves I collected, scanned and printed out. The result was nice, but lacked something.  I have been painting fabrics for a while and decided to try again using fabrics I had painted.  It has a much fresher look and that is the piece I submitted.  Photo 5

Photo 4: Seasonal Transformation using commercial fabrics.

Photo 5: Seasonal Transformation using my painted fabrics.

Since then I have made a third piece, tentatively called Leaf Pile. (Photo 6)  This quilt is poster sized and I used leaves from white oak, red oak, sugar maple, tulip poplar, Boston ivy and aspen.  These leaves all grow in the park I live on or in my yard. The fabrics are a mix of commercial and painted. I haven’t quilted it yet – still deciding exactly what to do. It was much more involved to create this piece, but very fun and I like the results so far.

The other finalists entered some beautiful pieces and only half will be selected as winners, so I am not getting my hopes too high.  But just to get a nod from Leah is already a huge boost!

Photo 6: Leaf Pile.  Yet to be quilted.