Fibermania

A Week's Worth of Work

There was a little of this, and

a lot of that and then finally, a big bunch of this..


Can you even tell it's quilted? Not so much. OH WELL.

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The Dance

Hand dyed cottons, fused, machine quilted, 57 x 60"

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It lost a few inches in the quilting, but I must say it was like buttah to quilt. Everything lay flat as a pancake and the thread broke about five time for the whole dang thing, which is like a miracle.

For the pictures it got a good pressing with a dampened press cloth. I spray the cloth and then press like mad. I got up earlier than usual to do this for the blog today.

I am greatly relieved to have finished this.

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This kind of quilt is not my usual competition kind of quilt. I mean quilt show stuff like for Paducah. It may be entered in art quilt shows in the future, where workmanship is not a major concern. But the quilting I do is the kind that regular quilt judges look at and say, 'Well if it weren't for the weird design of the piece the thing would have a chance at winning here. But we can't give this a prize because it is...not something...that we want to say we...endorse"

Which makes me think of other art work that may have seemed unlikely to win a prize at shows when it was premiered.

We are now so familiar with this image that if it were to fall into our laps, we would jump for joy, at least until the cops arrived. But imagine at first what the viewers must have felt when it they first saw it. Not something you'd wanna hang in your living room.

Well that is the conundrum for me. I want to make new looking art and not settle for the acceptable. So half the time I am less than confident about the results. I take a cue from my husband. At first he really doesn't like a lot of my work but later after he has seen it several times, he makes noises like "O that's a good one" or "We should hang that one up here".

Sometimes art takes a while to sink into our consciousness and become agreeable.