Monday, November 9, 2015

Mini art quilts 2 - Working in a series

Once again, my art quilt guild has been a great learning resource. I never got the idea of working in a series until we worked through this book by Elizabeth Barton. Suddenly I understood that one might have an idea that could have multiple permutations; that one might not have said everything in just one quilt. 

Once I was done with the scissors exercise, which insisted on being a flower, I found that the flower center, or the hinge of the scissors was a shape I wanted to explore more. 

Scissor flower
 The great thing about being a pack rat is that I had some fabulous grey fabric I bought to make a path in a farm picture I made for my great niece years ago. It made a lovely texture on the shape I wanted to use, which now persisted in looking like a star. It's harder to work abstractly than one might think! The eye insists on attributing meaning.
Scissor star

Then to find some graduated color hand-dyes, some overdyes which picked up all the colors, some silk for sheen and some hand-dyed thread and play time! The scissor handles have been reduced to mere curls.

French knots yet again. I just can't help myself...I was pleased that I could do some blanket stitch on the silk. I've never hand-embroidered silk before, and somehow I thought it would be more difficult than it was. I'm sure that fusing it added stability.
Scissor star detail
Voila! I really like this one and would like to do it bigger, but now I need to play with recreating the grey circle fabric as I don't have enough left to work with. Isn't it amazing that the same prompt could create such very different mini quilts?

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