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?

Mini art quilts

I would never have made a mini quilt if I didn't belong to an art quilt guild. We have worked our way through a couple of design books and in the process have made mini quilts to practice what the chapters were teaching. I moved from thinking that mini quilts were a waste of time as they had no purpose, to realizing that they are a great way to test out ideas ideas for a larger quilt, or to try new techniques.

This one began life as an exercise from Lyric Kinard. She suggested tracing around a pair of scissors and then playing with the tracing to make an abstract quilt. I liked the intersection of the handles, but when I repeated the design it insisted on becoming a flower shape. Some times you just have to give in... Next blog post I'll show you what happened when I explored that intersection further. Here it is the "flower" center.

Scissor "flower"

Something I find helpful when I am between ideas, or needing to do something mindless while ideas percolate, is to make strips. The strips here were fused from small leftover pieces. One day I fused long chains, just playing with colors and using up scraps. Lo and behold, I finally found a use for them.

Another reason to love hand-dyes: the ability to create graduated color. All of the outer sections came from one piece of fabric, which was dyed in a graduation from cerise through apricot. 

Of course a mini quilt is also a great excuse to play with some hand embroidery, and to couch some hand-dyed threads. Because it is so small it comes together quickly and is a breeze to sew. A mini quilt can be like a mini vacation after a big project!