Fast forward to 2007, when I took a 5-day course from Melly Testa in surface design techniques: thickened dye painting, monoprinting, screen printing, soy wax batik, stamping, discharge dyeing... I was totally blown away, and needed to use some of these wonderful tools, so I created my first post-Melly art quilt to meet a challenge she gave us to cut into two pieces of fabric we had created using our new tools:
This was another hand-stitched piece, and employed discharge dyeing, stamping, and included embellishments.
After that, I was hooked, and have made a number of art and landscape quilts in the past 3 years. I especially like to use photographs of landscapes as my inspiration, and I'm very drawn to scenes with rock formations. Here is one I created, along with the photos I used for my inspiration:
Obviously, I used a little creative license on the colors, but I was so smitten with the composition and shapes, I just had to do something with it!
Here is another example where I used a photo:
In this case, the photo had a tall palm tree on the right side that didn't add to the composition, so I ignored it when I created my picture. For this piece, I hand dyed all the fabric, including 'dirt dyeing' the fabric I used for the wall behind the cactus. And I used beading and hand stitching to enhance the cactus, but used free-motion stitching to quilt the rest of the piece.
You can see more of my work on my website, or on my blog .
I am looking forward to getting to know you all, and hopefully learning and sharing different techniques and styles as well! Thanks to Chris for inviting me to participate!
