Flight of Fancy

Quilt No 55

May 2007

The central hot-air balloon in this quilt was scaled up from a picture in a small calendar. The colours were so vibrant that I thought it would be fun to recreate them in a quilt. I designed several smaller balloons to go with it. Composing them in a suitably random and realistic manner was extremely challenging. I struggled so much with this project that I wanted to name the quilt A Nemesis of Balloons, but that proved to be an unpopular choice, and so it became Flight of Fancy.

Quilt Notes

The large balloon is done in appliqué which became increasingly difficult as the coloured strips near the balloon's edge became narrower and narrower. The other balloons were made of tiny pieces fused onto white cotton and then appliquéd onto the quilt.

The original photo came from a calendar

Uncharted

Quilt No. 54
May 2007

This is a tribute to the explorer Ernest Shackleton. In this quilt we see the silhouette of a ship that is exploring in Antarctic waters, with the high cliffs of glaciers in the background and the sea in the foreground. The ship was scaled up from a picture of a three-masted barquentine, the type of ship Shackleton used on his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914. While there are many photos of his ship Endurance there are none that give a simple view of it from the side. Another ship of the same style was used to create the pattern.

Quilting Notes

The sea was dyed with Setacolor fabric paint and overlaid strips of tissue paper. The fabric used for the glaciers was dyed with the leftover paint. Cotton embroidery floss was used for the rigging.

Original graphic used to create the pattern pieces for the ship

A Winter of Frost

Quilt No. 53
March 2007

This quilt was made for Bruna. It features a white dragonfly that is symbolic of her son Adam, who died of cancer at age sixteen, on February 14, 2001

Quilting Notes

The dragonfly was foundation pieced from a pattern I found quite by accident on the Internet.
I tried numerous unsuccessful techniques to create the frost frond before I discovered one that worked. I glued down strips of white-silver sparkled cotton fabric, and then covered these with gauze ribbon that was edged with silver. First I hand sewed along one edge or the ribbon, then along the other edge. I then I went back and gathered up the gauzy portion of the ribbon, which was much wider than the underlying strips of white, and secured it with an overcast of invisible nylon thread. Some of the ribbon came from a bouquet of roses from mother’s funeral in January 2007. Mom always wanted me to keep the ribbon whenever was given a floral arrangement. She would be thrilled to know that I came up with a permanent way to “keep the ribbon.”

Souls (2006)

Quilt No. 52

October 2006

Tuesdays with Morrie, a long-standing bestseller by Mitch Albom, tells the true story of his relationship with his professor, Morrie Schwartz. Mitch meets with Morrie every Tuesday afternoon as Morrie progresses through the devastating disease process of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His view of life and what is meaningful is profoundly changed as he begins to absorb Morrie’s final lessons.

Mitch Albom writes:

As my visits with Morrie go on I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that holds it – so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.
Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns as do we all.
That is what they believe.

Quilting Notes

The Earth  The Earth was created using Setacolor fabric dyes, with the silvery Shimmer Pearl added in a final layer, to create swirls of clouds.

The Sky  The initial sky background I made for this quilt used numerous strips of different black fabrics with gold stars. It was too cluttered looking, so I decided to use only one piece of fabric for the sky. As I started to take apart the discarded “sky” to reclaim the fabric, I envisioned using it as a night sky, with penguins on an iceberg. This became a small quilt entitled, What Do You Suppose Is Out There? It was finished before Souls, which became stalled in its wait for suitable objects to use as souls.

The Souls  The human souls were easy to find. My daughter readily agreed to let me use the tiny Guatemalan worry dolls she had received as a child. In Guatemala, children tell their worries to these dolls and place them under their pillow. In the morning, the worries are gone. The other souls were more difficult to locate. I tried unsuccessfully to find buttons or any metallic or plastic or wooden embellishments to use as animal figures for the souls. I finally gave up looking and began canvassing fellow crafters for a solution. Bonnie Spylo, of Bonnie’s Scrapbooking, found wonderful wooden animals at a Michaels store when she was travelling. I found a few additional souls in the form of iron-on patches.

Procuring souls was one thing, but how to arrange them on the quilt? This proved to be a huge hurdle, so I pinned the quilt on a large piece of cardboard and kept rearranging the souls on a daily basis. This went on for weeks. By this time, the quilt had been finished and waiting for the “souls” to be applied for 4 - 5 months. Eventually, I tried arranging them in a flowing curve that wanders behind the moon. This arrangement gave the quilt a feeling of motion, as though the souls were being pulled along together in an unbroken chain of life.

The Moon  It proved quite challenging to find just the right shape for the moon. Although there seemed to be an infinite number of moon shapes in drawings and pictures and shapes I created myself, none of them combined the correct proportion of crescent shape and pointiness that I wanted. With a great deal of trial and error, the final shape was finally achieved. The golden moon fabric was recycled from a favourite blouse.

Additional Notes
Selecting the quilting lines in the sky required a distant vanishing point far beyond the borders of the quilt. Several tables and rulers had to be called into play in order to get the lines set up in the right configuration. To attach the wooden animal souls to the quilt I glue-gunned a piece of wool on the back of each animal, and used a large darning needle to run the wool through the quilt and tie it at the back.

Welcome to the Jungle

Quilt No. 51

September 2006

Who wouldn’t want to be soaking up the beauty in this lush jungle?

Quilting Notes

This quilt was inspired by a piece of vibrant fabric that I bought at Fabricland. The lower portion with the animals is a single piece of fabric. Most of the animals that were duplicated as the fabric “repeat” occurs were concealed by fusing pieces of leaves or additional white birds over them. The leaves in the foreground were fussy cut and then appliquéd individually or in small clusters, a long and tedious process. Both the parrot and the leaves came from a complementary piece of fabric purchased with the animal fabric. I dyed the waterfall with fabric paint, using a fairly dry bristle paint brush to make the streaks in the water. Opaque Setacolor Shimmer Pearl dye added the sparkle. A very fine sheer fabric was bunched up for the mist at the foot of the waterfall. The background behind the parrot and the snow-capped mountains were also hand-dyed

What Do You Suppose Is Out There?

Quilt No. 50

July 2006

Who has not contemplated this subject from time to time? Perhaps even penguins have existential thoughts...

Quilting Notes

The background, made from strips of several different black-and-gold fabrics, was originally intended to be used for the quilt Souls, but was far too cluttered for the simplistic look that I wanted. The penguin buttons, given to me by my friend Ruth, who knows of my fondness for penguins, were made by an artist friend of hers.