La Serenissima up close

My quilt La Serenissima came home yesterday from the Great Northern Quilt Show, held in Harrogate last weekend and what is even nicer, she came accompanied by a large blue rosette for 2nd Prize in the Large Wallhangings category. She's sized 18.3/4" wide x 42. 3/4" which made one side large than 40, hence the Large designation although in fact this is one of my smaller quilts. If you're interested in how she was made you can read about it in an earlier post.

Above is an overview of the quilt but today I decided to zoom in to the details, specially as I can now show these to you so much larger! Oh, the joy of being connected to the big world out there via broadband so that I could finally change my blog template and the width of the centre column! The other thing that spurred me on to get closer is the Close Up theme for the Calumet Group on Blipfoto for this week.

And here they are; some very close views of the larger pieces of the fabric paper collages that are appliqued onto the quilt by machine and then framed with seed beads. As you can see I use a whole lot of different things to make my collages which are made on a background of calico (muslin if you're in the States), including stamping, vintage text, paper napkins, fabric paints (mainly Dye-na-Flow) and PVA glue. I don't mind the fact that when adding the top layers of napkins I get some texture as it's so thin. To me it all adds to the interest and in all truthfulness I'm too messy a worker to straighten it all out. Most of the stamps came from Alpha Stamps.

And some of them such as this stairway from Stampfranciso. I have a rather large collection of Venice related stamps, collage sheets, and other paraphernalia which come in handy as I don't foresee I'll stop making Venice related and inspired art any time soon.

But the picture that said Close-Up most to me was the one at the very top of this post which will become my blip for today. It really focusses in on the details of all the painting, splashing, spraying, stamping and stencilling I did on the background which I had machine quilter already as well as on my inchies, also made out of fabric paper collages.