Thursday, August 27, 2009

"Darjeeling"

My new quilt, "Darjeeling" is finished. I delivered it to the Anaba Tea Room yesterday. http://www.anabatearoom.com/. It will be part of group show by the Milwaukee Art Quilters. The theme is "To a Tea", and all the quilts are inspired by...tea!
At first, this theme was not particularly exciting to me--I don't drink a lot of tea. Coffee gal here. Also, at the last couple of meetings, a lot of the members were showing their quilts, most of which involved tea-dyed fabrics. They were all gorgeous and I was rather intimidated by the creativity and workmanship. But, again, that's something I don't do, either--tea dyeing. I had nothing in my head for this theme, until I saw a number of pictures of workers picking tea in both India and China, and was inspired by those. I chose to do a quilt of an Indian woman, mostly because I love the saris they wear. (So, really, this quilt was inspired not by tea, but by fashion!)

Doing a portrait quilt is something I've never done before, but I wanted to figure it out. I got a lot a great instruction by reading a couple of books. I started with "The Art Quilt Workbook", by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston. http://janedavila.blogspot.com/ Such a great source for a beginner art quilter such as myself. Then I got a copy of "Portraits for Fabric Lover" by Marilyn Belford http://www.marilynbelford.com/content/start/ and used a lot of those techniques. I learned a lot about threadpainting from that book, mostly that it's really fun!!
Of course, I appealled to the vast knowledge of the people on the QuiltArt mailing list wen I got stuck.
The background, basket and most of the leaves are commercial batiks, and her scarf is also a commercial quilt frabirc. The rest of the fabrics are scraps of different silks I had lying around. While choosing them, I found fabrics from which I had made ball skirts, tunics and vests. Pieces of my entire "after five" wardorbe are in this quilt!
The sari is accented with a blue trim I had, and a piece of gold trim that was sent to me by Janice Paine-Dawes (see the above post). Thanks, Janice. I also used a bit of the green fabric I had dyed in my class last week (see the post before that). Thanks, Nancy!





Detail:

I'm happy with this. But I am most excited about actually having a piece, for sale, in a gallery with real artists.
If it sells, I'll not be able to live with myself I'll be so ecstatic! Crossing my fingers...

8 comments:

  1. MOTOVATIONAL
    I'm away for a cuppa tea 8-)

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  2. Thanks for sharing. I'm impressed that you were brave enough to use "after five" fabric. Very inspiring.

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  3. Congratulations on showing! Keep up the good work and never think of your self as less than "real artists".... Lisa

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  4. Thanks, everyone, for the nice comments.

    Diana--you have tea; I'll have a cuppa joe!
    Diane--I backed some of those silks with a fusable interfacing. Once that was done, they were very easy to work with.
    Michigoose--Thanks! I'm getting used to calling myself "an artist". Still is weird to me.

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  5. Great art piece! Inspiring! Thanks for sharing some of the process and how you learned some of this technique. Looking forward to seeing more from you.

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  6. TONI, WOW, it is beautiful. I would love to see it in person. I AM SURE EVERYONE WILL LOVE IT. GREAT JOB! LOOKS GOOD.

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  7. Toni, Thanks for visiting my blog and posting a comment. Now I know about you and Your blog. I love this portrait piece. Very impressive. Lisa Ellis

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  8. I love this portrait. It is lovely. Thanks for visiting my blog and posting a comment. Leigh-Anne

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