A Forest of Art Quilt Trees

My local quilt guild, the Batty Binders, has a small subgroup of women interested in art quilting.  Since we had a group of machine quilters called "Stitching Sisters", I dubbed our merry little group of artists the "Twisted Stitchers."  Not terribly original, but the really fun ones had been taken by other groups.

The group tends to be interested in trying new techniques.  Together, they worked through Jane D'Avila and Elin Waterston's "Art Quilt Workbook." Then, they decided to do an art quilt "round robin."  A round robin is where one person starts a quilt, then passes it on to another who adds something and passes it on to the next person until the entire group has had an opportunity to add something.

In our case, each of the participants made a small quilt, roughly 9 x 14 which had a tree on it.  I didn't participate because I had enough unfinished things on my plate and I didn't want to commit to this not knowing how I would be feeling since I was just beginning chemotherapy.

So....I was the only one in the group who had seen them all through all stages of the process.

They're pretty fun, and over the next while I'll be interspersing these and talking about them.  I'm fighting the computer tonight and it's a little late....I want to pull up the beginning piece and then show you the end piece.  Each of the quilters put their pieces in a box along with a journal for everyone to write down what they were thinking while they made the piece and why they added what they did.  They also included a camera to take a picture of the quilt as it went through it's various transformations.