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Creative Quilt Challenges: Shape Shifting

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

I was invited by Wendy Hill and Pat Pease, authors of  Creative Quilt Challenges (C&T Publishing, 2016) to participate in their invitational exhibit: Shape Shifting.

Creative Quilt Challenges is a Special Exhibit at the Pacific International Quilt Festival (PIQF) , October 13-16, in Santa Clara, California. Shape Shifting will be an exhibit within their Creative Challenges exhibit. Please be sure to stop by Pat Pease and Wendy Hill’s exhibit at PIQF if you are attending and tell my friends “hello”!

For my piece in this invitational exhibit, I had decided to actually do some “shape shifting” and transform an existing art quilt piece that I was not too sure about, into something that actually made me smile.

SHAPE SHIFTING

I began with this existing piece, Ohio, which I last discussed in the post Update: Ohio

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Something about the piece was displeasing to me and the piece felt kind of “blah”. So I removed the borders using with some very careful seam ripping (the piece is made of recycled silks; and then sliced apart a couple sections of the piece.

Then I played around with a border of BRIGHT fuchsia-pink raw silk that a friend picked up from a thrift shop and shared with me:

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The selvage of the bright fuchsia raw silk had the name “FOUWAH, HONG KONG”. Some “googling” revealed this piece was likely a vintage fabric from Fou Wah Fabrics of Hong Kong:

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Here is the final design of the piece, which I am tentatively naming: Ohio Shifted (I will have to create quite the Artist Statement on this piece to explain to the viewer where I got the name from…I might rethink the name…we’ll see…)

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I selected this fabric for the back of the piece:

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The piece is now ready for quilting. I am going to “put my big girl panties on” and quilt this art quilt myself. I need to be able to give it to Wendy and Pat by September 15th and I need to keep challenging myself to go to places (my own art quilting) that I do not want to go, so I can grow.

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Initially I was going to go buy some bright fuchsia thread to quilt it with but I have selected a soft gold thread (the one on the left) that mirrors the colors in some of the blocks. I might also another another thread color, still deciding.

(Note – I did do a 1/8 an inch stitch around the edge of the piece using a 2.0 stitch length to stop the raw silk from fraying any further than the edges).

I am going to practice what I want to do as far as quilting on the quilt on a scrap silk “quilt sandwich” before I quilt on my actual piece.  A couple of months ago I did quilt an entire art quilt myself for a piece for another invitational exhibit that I will post about in the future.

POSTSCRIPT

In March, I did participate in a Blog Tour to celebrate the release of the art quilting book, Creative Quilt Challenges by Pat Pease and Wendy Hill.

If you would like to read my post for my part of the blog tour, where I discuss working with “unlikely materials” (recycled silks, denim, wool) in making quilts please see the link below:

BLOG TOUR DAY 4: Unlikely Materials

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Photo credit: Amazon.com

Published by tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Quilter, crafter, obsessive tea drinker and lover of all furry creatures (especially dogs and cats) - join me on my tierneycreates blog as I share stories from "A Crafter's Life".

17 thoughts on “Creative Quilt Challenges: Shape Shifting”

  1. Thanks Tierney for the exhibit and book promotions! Your art statement could include a before thumbnail photo- picture worth a thousand words right? We’ve reviewed our first SS quilt from Canada—- exciting.

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  3. The bright pink is perfect! And the rearranging also helped. If I have a fabric to lay beside a quilt, I can make color decisions; I still can’t look at a quilt and say, “X is the color it needs.” Working on it.

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  5. Oh my gosh! I didn’t know I was following such a famous person! Congratulations!

    I really like what you have done with your piece. It looks way better now with its’ new border. I can’t wait to see how your quilting turns out.

    Way to GO!

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  8. The bright pink is perfect! And seeing this makes me want to look for thrift shop silks. Not sure how that will work out since I live in a rather economically challenged rural area, but maybe when I visit the “big city”. Your quilt is beautiful!

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