Flower Tower

The Festival of Quilts in Birmingham is on right now and that gives me the opportunity to share some images with you of my work hanging at the show that I had to keep secret till now. This is the first one and there will be more as three of my quilts are there. This one, called Flower Tower is part of the "Seasonal Garden" show organized by the European Quilt Association (EQA) and hangs in the themed EQA gallery at the show. Their exhibition is a showcase at the Festival, "embracing the spirit of friendship and cooperation between quilters across Europe". Each member country of the EQA has provided sixteen 30cm square quilts based on the season. For the UK that was summer!

I have exhibited with quite a few of the previous EQA shows and I have to say I was very happy not just with the theme this year but specially with the fact that we were allocated summer.

For the background I pieced together a variety of leaf themed fabrics I painted myself using the gelli plate and a wide variety of leaves from the garden as masks and as stamps. The flowers were made using a flower stamp in 3 different sizes and hand painted fabrics. I made the flowers separately by layering the 3 different sizes together, adding lots of hand embroidery and embellishments and then sewing them into position on the background as shown. I tried a variety of arrangements of the flowers but in the end kept coming back to this flower tower.