Art Quilt Trees: Becky Goodwin

 Here's Becky Goodwin and her tree "blank" for the Round Robin.  Becky's was really neat because everyone reacted to it in the same way.....We saw an acacia tree in Africa....

The background is a brown batik ....

When we were passing these around, the person who started the piece had to leave the room....they were kept in boxes , and we discovered we had to add paper to some of the boxes so you couldn't peep in and see your piece before "the reveal."

Here's Becky and her sister Jo Heffner as Becky looks at her piece for the first time in a year.

This turned out to be one of the best ones.  Linnette Vagedes added the eagle---and her husband and she kept on moving the eagle around the piece before it was positioned here.  She made it so that the wing would flip out and be dimensional.

Loraine Smith added the hut, which also had dimensions....I think...I don't remember who added the one lady with the burden...I think it was Ruth Treon who added the path as well.  Then the second lady was added by someone else...

The stamped giraffe in the background was really neat...as was the dimensional "bush" at the far right (Gwen Brown's addition?)....Jo Heffner made the really cool mask....in a really creative way.  She took a plastic baby spoon and cut the handle off..her husband smoothed it out for her.  She then made paper mache out of shredded paper to make the dimension of the mask. covering it with fabric.  She then painted the face marks on with paint pens as the fine elements of the mask were not noticeable unless you increased the contrast.


I'm really glad that they had the journals which accompanied this because I sure as heck can't remember who did what!
Well done!

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.