Of Immortality

Of Immortality

I should have revealed this quilt to you back in May when it was first exhibited in Germany but completely forgot to do so. It's just been on show again, this time at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham last weekend and this time I'm rectifying making it public by showing it here on this blog too. The idea came from a cooperation between the German and British Quilting Guilds. Members from both guilds were invited to send a pack of fabric (about 5 fat quarters) to their own guilds and these were then exchanged so that a German quilter would receive a pack from a British quilter and vice versa. 

You can see the fabrics I send to Germany in an earlier blog post here and here. And a bit further down in this post is the fabric I received from a German quilter about whom I only know that her last name is Bitler and she lives in Bad Meunden. The fabric was okay but not at all what I usually have in my work and it took me some time to get around that problem. In the end I used two of her fabrics, added 3 of my own (2 in the body of the quilt and the gold fabric for the binding), sewed them together in a Fibonacci sequence, machine quilted the layers using straight machine stitching and then proceeded to paint the entire piece starting with a layer of white emulsion paint. I then splattered, sprayed, stencilled, stamped and in general messed around with it till I achieved something I was happy with. It took days to dry!

I then added inchies and larger pieces from a fabric paper collage I made on the theme of flowers and butterflies. The size of the quilt was a given and it had to be 16" wide by 32" long. The title came from one of the fabric paper collage pieces where I discovered it quite accidentally on one of the vintage texts I had used in the collage. I love it when coincidence or synchronicity as I like to call it, steps in to help me. 

Of course there is lots of beading too as you can see on the detailed photographs above.

the fabrics I received from the German quilter

Both guilds selected 30 works from among their submissions and these 60 works were then exhibited together with the sheet for each quilt

as can be seen above for my quilt, showing the fabrics that were used. At the top the fabrics I received from the German quilter and below that the ones I added to the mix from my own stash. In the case of my quilt this was quite useful as the fabrics can barely be recognized any more in the quilt itself.

Detail from the exhibition as it hung at the Festival of Quilts, Birmingham

I wasn't in Birmingham myself to see the exhibition and it's thanks to Gillian Cooper that I can show you the two pictures here of the quilt hanging at the show. I'm hoping there will be a bit of a write-up about this exhibit somewhere as I would quite like to see the other quilts in more detail. I would also love to know if whoever in Germany received my fabric pack made it into the show or not.

A close-up from Birmingham

This quilt was the prototype for another quilt which I have already shown you called La Serenissima which was exhibited at the Thistle Quilters exhibition earlier this summer. I love the quilt first, paint later method and you can expect to see it again in future.