Archive for the ‘architectural/buildings’ Category

A Twist for my Tower Blocks

Saturday, April 22nd, 2017

Continuing my interest in making towers with cupolas, I set up a Pinterest board (Cupolas, turnips, onions-Kay Liggett) to collect inspirational images.  This one is all turned wood, with various finish options, free-hand pyrography, and gilders paste.  The block of green twistwork is a simple 3-start twist.  11.5″ tall

A special thanks to Austrian artist Hundertwasser, for inspiring some brighter colors, and to global wood artist Nick Agar for teaching me how to apply different colors to wood.

Starting with a drawing…

Friday, April 8th, 2016

This series of 3 quilts started with a drawing of four peppermills on the table.  The shapes were similar, but varied in proportions, and I liked the way that the overlapping shapes created perspective without the pesky business of making a realistic 3D rendering.   I chose a color scheme that I rarely use, leaning toward adjacent colors (red and violet) with limited value range.

The background is heavily quilted because there is a lot of it, and the handpainted fabric is quilted with only a few hand embroidery stitches.  This lavender/red fabric was made in a ‘scroll’ that I learned from Linda Colsh in 2015.

When I had arranged all of the shapes, I cut away the background fabric in as big a piece as I could manage.  This scrap became a ‘gift’ for the composition of the next quilt.  I was careful to save lots of scraps with this project in order to incorporate them into the next quilt.  It felt like a very traditional way of working, to value all the leftovers.  The challenging part was to find a way to also value the shapes of the scraps.

First Gift/second in a series

Friday, April 8th, 2016

After piecing together the 4 Classic Shapes quilt, I had two large scraps cut from the background–the flowery shapes on the right and the left, as well as some left-over handpainted pink/purple fabric.

The scraps were long, but thinner than the original quilt, so this design is taller and skinnier, almost like minarets on the horizon.  The hand-painted fabric is in the foreground, with no quilting.  It is quite a bit stiffer than the other fabrics, and the patterns are very subtle, so quilting would obscure the complexity of the fabric.  The brighter fabric is a new addition, which follows on to the next quilt as a kind of gift of its own.

Another quilter at the Alegre Retreat (’04 or ’05) told me about the way that scraps could be used as Gifts to built a series of quilts.  I believe that she was in a class with Michael James.

Second Gift/Third in Series

Friday, April 8th, 2016

Casbah Dream is a tribute to the drawings and paintings that Matisse did of Moroccan subjects.

The Gifts that generated this quilt are the two black domes (cut from the background of Minarets) , and the many small scraps for the clamshell parts.  I added green and some blue to this color scheme.  The Casbah gate in Tangier has been drawn and painted by many artists.

The clamshells have a nice evocative shape that could be architectural, or possibly even botanical.

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