Quilty
Carrie here. I've been quilting for about 10 years. I like experimenting with color and geometry to create something unique and maybe meaningful (to me, anyway). Below are a few quilts from the archives. Click on the pictures to make them bigger. |
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"Big" Quilts
Tree of Life (unfinished) This (blurry, sorry!) photo was taken when the piecing was only about 2/3 done. I changed the top corners a bit and I will be adding some details with applique and quilting. When I made the line drawing for this, I made a lot of the lines and shapes continue between the foreground and the background, blending them a bit. I think the addition of color obscured that idea, so I am thinking about making this exact same design again with different colors. |
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Penguins One of my favorite memories is seeing yellow-eyed penguins in New Zealand. This was started just after going to a Ruth McDowell lecture (great inspiration, but only if you are up for a technical challenge). I sketched this out on freezer paper first, then chose the fabrics as I went. I was trying to use colors that I had previously thought were "too ugly", just to expand my palette a bit. Anyway, this quilt has a lot of extremely tiny pieces (under 1/4 inch) and innumerable partial seams. I need to figure out how to minimize these annoyances in the design stage, lest I lose my mind. |
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Morning Star A rare foray into traditional quilting! For a long time, I have wanted to try this pattern, called "Morning Star," "Star of Bethlehem" or "Lone Star", but I didn't want to make a full size one. So here it is in miniature. |
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Untitled (Landscape) This one started as a backing for the city quilt (see below) using scraps. I quickly discovered that (a) there is no way I could sew through 2 layers of rusted fabric, and (2) I like this quilt more than the city quilt anyway. I put absolutely no conscious thought into this quilt until the very end- I just kept putting little scraps together until I had large pieces, and then I arranged the large pieces and filled in the remaining gaps. It only took 2 afternoons to design and sew the top.
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Untitled (Cityscape) This quilt was designed to make use of some fabrics I had transferred rust onto. Here's more about the process. I think this looks like a cityscape, but I was also thinking about old train cars when I made it. |
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Octopus: Scholar of the Pelagic |
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Wedding Rings / Dodecagons It's a hexagon! I was doodling interlocking shapes (nerdalert) and thought it might be fun to use improvisational piecing to fill in the centers, while letting the strict geometry of the interlocking dodecagons pull it all together. I loved doing the centers-- it's a very painterly process. There are no 90 degree angles in this whole quilt! |
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Square Peg This quilt was on the back of the bench James and I sat on at our wedding. I came up with the design as a simple way to show off the color-blending hand-dyed fabric. I also like how the dark background creates a luminous effect. This quilt is ALL 90 degree angles. I couldn't bear to trim off the zigzag edge, so I just left it on.
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Pearls I had this set of cyanotype hand-prints that I wanted to mix with my extensive collection of blue fabric (see Corbin quilt, below). Once I got all of the blue parts together, I added the sheer fabric overlay to emphasize the center, but I had no idea what all the hands would be reaching for (this was becoming a Rorschach test). The blue reminded me of moonlight and dreaming, so I thought of a moon and rabbit, but they came out a bit too cute for my taste. I want to rip them out and put something else in, but I still don't know what the hands are reaching for. Ideas? |
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Picnic I made the set of fork and spoon cyanotypes one summer, and then they sat in a drawer for a year before I pulled them out and tried different arrangements on my wall. Eventually I decided that I liked massing them together in a Log Cabin configuration so that the alternating direction of the lines and the variation in the blue creates "movement" or shimmering. I still think this quilt is missing something, but I haven't figured out what. Any ideas? I'm thinking of re-quilting it to add more texture (right now, it is just "stitch in the ditch").
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Corbin Wedding Quilt I made this bed-sized quilt for our friends the Corbins, who were getting married. I asked what kind of quilt they wanted, and they said "blue" so here ya go. This is a modern variation on Log Cabin. Traditionally, the centers of the block are red, to symbolize the hearth of a happy home. This quilt has at least 100 different fabrics. |
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Paddle! Paddle! Paddle! I made this quilt for my then-boyfriend, James, who is a whitewater kayaking instructor. When students get a little hesitant while going through rapids, James yells "Paddle! Paddle! Paddle!" In this piece, I used a lot of techniques that were new to me at the time, including thread couching (the water lines), paper piecing (the "monkey wrench" border) and freezer-paper applique.
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Takoma Nights My old neighborhood had a lot of well-tended gardens. This one is supposed to be a rose garden. Although the piecing is a variation on Log Cabin, this was also an experiment in improvisational design. I made the flowers first, then added the background to fill in. I learned a lot about the color red. |
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Small Quilts
Self Portrait (unfinished) This was an experiment to see how realistic I could make raw-edged applique. I put a photo in Photoshop, reduced the number of colors, and then used that as a sort of pattern. I chose the blue-green simply because I had a good range of values (light-dark) in my collection already. I like this one for several technical reasons, but I can't imagine actually displaying it anywhere. Which is probably why it isn't finished! |
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Memory This li'l guy appears in the book Creative Quilting: Journal Quilts, published Oct 2006! I threw it together one afternoon after hearing Isabelle Allende on the radio describe memory, and therefore storytelling, as "black and white": we remember good times and bad, but not the everyday "gray" routine. I added some sensory memories that aren't necessarily part of stories-- you know, a color or song or smell that takes you back to a certain time or place. I like to look at those little floating squares and think of which memories they might represent. The darker green is always the warm, slightly metallic tasting water from the garden hose in the height of summer when I was a kid too wrapped up in playing to go inside for a drink of water.
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Tuna Cat Most! Self-explanatory! Quilt! Ever! I used fabric crayons and some crazy free-motion embroidery to make the Tuna. I also painted the border fabric. |
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Walk Like an Andean I love ancient Peruvian weaving. These characters were inspired by some fellas on a textile I saw in a book. They are said to be shamans engaged in ecstatic dancing and/or communicating with the dead. See the little ribs?
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The Bride I did this little conversation piece for a "Day of the Dead" challenge. You can read more about it here. Ironically, she was on tour the entire time I was engaged. I like the little veins on her heart, and the marigolds. |
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