Fern by Ildiko

It may be surprising that this piece was originally designed to be another stone-rock-cliff piece for 2015. My original inspiration was a marbled stone, which I wanted to make in a green-blue palette, with a touch of yellow and purple.
I had dyed two largish pieces of fabric but neither was really close to my vision but one piece came out nicely: one end being blue, and the other green. Really fern green to me. I ironed fusible webbing to the green piece and, after drawing a few guiding lines,  I started to cut it freehand. After ironing it on the blue end of the fabric, I quilted it in place, and then added more quilting in contrasting colours in between the strips. Finally, I used a bit of yellow shiva to highlight a few areas.

Cliffs

 

 

Moving on with this year's series, I keep concentrate on nature's shapes.

In this quilt I drew cliffs at sun set standing at the foot of a river that flows slowly. I used a hand dyed fabric which was made especially for this quilt, but to be honest I was so surprise with the result, as I didn't imagine I can get the right shape I wanted to have. Then I added a commercial cotton fabric that matched the colors. The free motion quilting helped me get the right shades and depth.

 

 

 

Shoshi



Expectations

This is the third in my series for "Nature Abstracted", the caterpillar.  I'm creating the life cycle of the butterfly in reverse for this series.  In my research of caterpillars for this quilt, I was amazed at the incredible adaptations and beautiful configurations of the various caterpillar species.  Some are very simple and others are so elegantly overdone that they look more like elaborate jewelry than caterpillars.  They are all preparing for the same destiny, though.  It is interesting to see how the characteristics of the caterpillar carry over to the moth or butterfly.

For this piece I used the same fabrics I used for the butterfly and for the chrysalis.  I also used some of my hand-dyed silk for the twig upon which the caterpillar is balancing.  I used fusible applique for each of the fabric pieces and then machine stitched each pieces into place and free motion quilted.  I like the way this caterpillar stands out against the "blue sky" background".

Frances

SANDRA SULLIVAN Nature Abstracted TRIFFIDACIOUS 4 OF 4

My fourth and last piece in Nature Abstracted series of 4.

TRIFFIDACIOUS 4.   I had fun creating these abstracted pieces with all four pieces on rust dyed background, linear work at the base of some wonderful commercial fabric. Hand drawn direct onto fabric, stitched and painted using Inktence pencils. Inspiration from wonderful tropical plants that develop in different light, hence the sun rising generating rays across the land and water.

SANDRA SULLIVAN Nature Abstracted TRIFFIDACIOUS 3 OF 4

My third piece in Nature Abstracted series of 4. 

TRIFFIDACIOUS 3.   I had fun creating these abstracted pieces with all four pieces on rust dyed background, linear work at the base of some wonderful commercial fabric. Hand drawn direct onto fabric, stitched and painted using Inktence pencils. Inspiration from wonderful tropical plants that develop in different light, hence the sun rising generating rays across the land and water.

SANDRA SULLIVAN Nature Abstracted TRIFFIDACIOUS 2of 4

Hi - My second piece in Nature Abstracted series of 4.

TRIFFACIOUS 2.   I had fun creating these abstracted pieces with all four pieces on rust dyed background, linear work at the base of some wonderful commercial fabric. Hand drawn direct onto fabric, stitched and painted using Inktence pencils. Inspiration from wonderful tropical plants that develop in different light, hence the sun rising generating rays across the land and water.

Hi - My first piece in Nature Abstracted series of 4.
TRIFFACIOUS 1.   I had fun creating these abstracted pieces with all four pieces on rust dyed background, linear work at the base of some wonderful commercial fabric. Hand drawn direct onto fabric, stitched and painted using Inktence pencils. Inspiration from wonderful tropical plants that develop in different light, hence the sun rising generating rays accross the land and water.

A Dazzling of Sunlight

A Dazzling of Sunlight

Summer? What summer? We don't seem to have had one, here in the Cotswolds. Well, perhaps one day in early July. This “hot” piece of glittering suns must be me thinking back to our Southern France summers.

The background strips show blue skies and golden days. The suns are appliquéd in various fabrics, silk, batik, hand dyes, synthetics and some are embroidered with seed stitching. Each sun is beaded and surrounded with golden metallic rays. The background is machine quilted with rayon thread.

Now on to the Autumn piece, with falling leaves.

Complete

The inspiration for my 4th quilt of this year was the cattail. Not the animal part, but the water plant:-). And as the theme is abstracted nature, I gave it a twist. Here is how my version looks like:

I used my own hand dyed and snow dyed fabrics, plus Ugandan barkcloth for the stems.

Originally I had posted a greyscale quilt as the first one for this year, but I made a replacement for that one. Here are the other 3 quilts I made for this theme:

Finished

Festival of Quilts is over and now I am finishing quilts.
I have been working on a set of quilts using counterchange principles - light on a dark background and dark on a light background.
I now have a nature abstracted counterchange series

Now I have to decide which one of the above  I will display at Prague. If you look carefully you can see the positive and the negative, making 2 different quilts

I have just come back from teaching in South Africa. There are guinea fowl images everywhere. So I took a simple shape of a guinea fowl and made lots of drawings. I printed the guinea fowl shapes that I cut out as well as printing the backgrounds i.e. the negative shapes, then added some blue and red paint

For my final piece I was inspired by simple tree shapes and again used the positive and negatives but this time added some paint using a stencil.

Gillian