Art Quilt

I'm not sure how it happened. I think it began by pinning a couple art quilts which caught my eye on Pinterest. First they went on to my Quilting Board but I soon created an Art Quilts board as I found myself drawn to pin more and more art quilts. I had never seen quilts like these before; their colors, textures, and designs captivated my imagination and gave me courage that I could play with fabric and principles of design as I ventured into new creative avenues with recycled fabrics.

After a couple months of admiring and pinning, I decided to attempt my first art quilt. The boys bedroom was slowly morphing into a guest room and I needed a wall hanging to replace the baseball poster. The room already had some bold colors, including a dark red Bedouin rug with some orange and black accents. I wanted to make this art quilt entirely out of recycled fabrics and decided to begin with my felted wool, which I felt would give me the textures and colors I wanted to go with the bold, minimalist decor of the room.

I knew that I must be gentle with myself and begin simply, and so I chose to do uneven Log Cabin squares, imitating this scrap quilt design by textile artist Victoria Gertenbach. I used scraps and then pulled pieces from some other sweaters to achieve the color scheme I wanted.

It was very easy to cut the pieces for this 3 feet/1meter square quilt--I didn't measure as I used my rotary cutter and quilting ruler to cut a collection of strips of varying widths and trimmed these strips to their required length as I created my squares. The seams don't show here, but they are completely flat as I butted the edges of the wool together and zig-zagged them.

 I found a used denim curtain panel at the second-hand market, which I used for the back of the quilt. The middle layer is a cotton flannel sheet, also recycled, and the binding is fashioned from denim shirt scraps. I quilted all three layers as I zig-zagged the finished squares together, so it only has four actual quilting lines. I made a three inch sleeve that runs the length of the top of the quilt. Dear Husband engineered the rest of the hanging apparatus using a scrap piece of wood (from an old bookshelf) Much to his delight, was able to hang it on the nail/screw which held the baseball poster, as he doesn't like to put too many holes in the wall. Drilled concrete is not easily patched.

When Artist Son arrived, I enjoyed discussing the color and design principles of this quilt. I think there actually are some, though I don't know how to talk about them well--I'm learning. I've noticed that the "random" look is not randomly achieved and that I choose colors carefully, even for a design that sort of looks thrown together. I find one of the greatest satisfactions of finishing a project is, besides the finished project, the permission I give myself to begin dreaming of and plotting the next project...