Visual Texture and Art + Quilt

Tonight was my Batty Binder's Art Quilt study group (Twisted Stitchers). I've been leading a small group of women through the Art Quilt Workbook by Jane D'Avila and Elin Waterston. Since I knew several people were going to be gone tonight (in actuality only two were) and I wasn't sure where in the process everyone was, I decided we would share what we have and do an exercise on visual texture from Lyric Kinard's book, Art + Quilt.

We started out with our "share". Susan Pickerell, at right, brought along a bag of trims and goodies she picked up at a church rummage sale. In the bag were all sorts of wonderful things, including this chiffon headscarf that Linette Vagedes had to share with us, modeling it in her best 1960s and 70s style. No, she doesn't look this goofy in her normal life. Susan was kind and shared some of her bounty with us. We did look at four small quilts, but I was so involved in moving the group along..I forgot to shoot them.

My Miami Valley Art Quilt Network has just started working through Art +Quilt. As usual, I'm behind...and I'm quaking in my boots as this book has many in depth exercises. If I can complete it, then I think I will have learned a lot and become a better quilter.

The point of the book is design methods. In this particular exercise, you are to photocopy in black and white five different fabrics which have different visual texture, then combine them in various ways to see what happens. In the MVAQN group, we realized that the stark white backgrounds didn't seem to make as successful designs, so I had this group put it on a textured background, although we discussed the differences. This exercise is great, but time consuming. One of our MVAQN members spent about 20 hours working on hers.

Here, you see our rebel, Gwen Brown's composition. It's pretty neat...although Gwen decided to make her pieces have actual texture in addition to the print. She made her paper "quilt" three dimensional. I can't complain too much because my effort was really bad and I couldn't quite seem to get anything going that I liked.


Here's Ruth Treon's. Pretty cool. Next is Susan Pickrell's.





















This last one is supposed to be a vertical orientation, and it also cheats a little as it too is three dimensional as well as having a strip of chenille rickrack added.

Lyric's book, if it continues in this vein, is going to require a lot of effort to complete the exercises. I hope I can get some time to work on them. In the meantime, enjoy these paper "quilts."