Freedom Quilts

It seems like it has been quite some time since I blogged about my main occupation, quilt making, and yet, this is how I spend most of my days, even though I enjoy my little forays into mixed media, photography and graveyard visiting and all my other actitiving.

It's just that making quilts is very time consuming so there is little to show you while I'm in the process and on top of that there is the requirement of most shows not to have revealed your work to the world before the exhibition concerned opens. Such was the case for these 2 little (20 x 30cm) quilts, but they faced the public for the first time at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham in August this year, so quite some time ago. I had so far forgotten I hadn't revealed them here.

They were both made for the theme of Freedom and will be travelling all around Europe for the coming few years, including exciting visits to Germany, the Czech Republic and Russia among others. This travellling exhibition is the brain child of a German quilter, Gudrun Heinz. She comes up with the themes (I'm participating for the 3rd time in one of her exhibitions), and organizes the busy schedule of where they will be exhibited. You can read all about coming venues, past exhibitions etc. on her website here. And there is also a CD available for each of these exhibition including the Freedom one.

My inspiration for both pieces came from a page in my Vintage Gluebook that you can see underneath on the left hand side. The vintage image I used on that page seemed to embody the Freedom theme to me. And by great synchronicity the page actually shows a map of a German city as well as gothic German text. How's that for co-incidence! It was simply meant to be turned into pieces for a German exhibition.

All the fabrics I used were hand-dyed and painted and of course they also feature my signature embellishments, seed beads! The figure was printed onto cottom fabric sheets and appliqued down. There are also postage stamps as well as vintage paper text (covered in Glossy Accents) and the title: Je suis libre, which translates as I am free from French. It sounds a lot more exotic in that language!