The group to which I belong, London Quilters, will be having its biennial exhibition from 17 November 2014 to 4 January 2015. The show is called 'Coming Home', inspired largely by the blue and white group quilt featuring houses.
Part of the show will include small quilts (12"x12"/30x30cm) about World War 1, interpreted in a free style by the makers.
I wanted to use an image of a poppy as the constant element in my quilts and found one in my photograph archive, a picture taken in Regents Park in the summer of 2013. This beauty formed the basis of my work:
I used the image in different ways for each of the quilts. For the top left quilt, I enlarged the image in Photoshop Elements, and printed it on fabric treated for printing, in this case EQ Printables. The names of the towns and cities were printed on with fabric paint, using an antique typeface set.
For the second quilt, top right, I traced the poppy image onto calico and free machine stitched it in red thread, together with the leaves. The battlefield names were again printed with fabric paints using a modern set of letters. I felt the piece was out of balance and painting the image with liquid acrylic paint improved it.
The bottom left quilt incorporates a 1900 map of France and the same poppy image, both printed on fabric. I cut out a stencil of poppy seedheads and used Markal paintstiks to create the images on the quilt.
The last quilt uses the same map of France, this time in monochrome. The image of the soldier was painted on fabric. The poppy image was manipulated in Photoshop Elements to give a sense of perspective and printed onto ExtravOrganza, silk organza prepared for printing. The poppies were highlighted with a fine black Sharpie and cut out before being machine stitched onto the background. The barbed wire and posts were inked in using the same Sharpie, the posts also being machine stitched for accent.
Part of the show will include small quilts (12"x12"/30x30cm) about World War 1, interpreted in a free style by the makers.
I wanted to use an image of a poppy as the constant element in my quilts and found one in my photograph archive, a picture taken in Regents Park in the summer of 2013. This beauty formed the basis of my work:
I used the image in different ways for each of the quilts. For the top left quilt, I enlarged the image in Photoshop Elements, and printed it on fabric treated for printing, in this case EQ Printables. The names of the towns and cities were printed on with fabric paint, using an antique typeface set.
For the second quilt, top right, I traced the poppy image onto calico and free machine stitched it in red thread, together with the leaves. The battlefield names were again printed with fabric paints using a modern set of letters. I felt the piece was out of balance and painting the image with liquid acrylic paint improved it.
The bottom left quilt incorporates a 1900 map of France and the same poppy image, both printed on fabric. I cut out a stencil of poppy seedheads and used Markal paintstiks to create the images on the quilt.
The last quilt uses the same map of France, this time in monochrome. The image of the soldier was painted on fabric. The poppy image was manipulated in Photoshop Elements to give a sense of perspective and printed onto ExtravOrganza, silk organza prepared for printing. The poppies were highlighted with a fine black Sharpie and cut out before being machine stitched onto the background. The barbed wire and posts were inked in using the same Sharpie, the posts also being machine stitched for accent.
