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In honor of February’s ‘Snow Moon,’ I made this quilt with hand-painted silks and a commercial batik fabric.  It is meant to create nostalgia in space travellers for what they left behind.  Of course, they see the heavens with the colors of their own experiences, which is not exactly the more black-and-white way that we think of the Milky Way from high in the mountains of Colorado.  Thanks to the Hubble telescope, we know that those colors are out there…

Like an embroidery sampler, this small quilt has a domestic feeling, with the three odd moons to place it in the interstellar series.  The row of white dots across the landscape add another technical element just beyond our usual sense of tin-can space structures.  No guns in sight.  Just ‘Home Sweet Colony.’

Scraps of marbled cotton in this 12 x 12″ quilt reflect some of the swirling of nebulae in recent space photography.  Without silk, it is hard to create the luminosity of nearby stars and planets.  These are acrylic paints with the ‘Starry Starry Night’ title printed on the front of the quilt.

‘Distant Planet is the second of the Interstellar quilts.  Dyed silk combines with commercial cottons and machine quilting to evoke an unfamiliar sky.  The shape of the quilt and the green silk reflect the quadrilaterals used extensively in Star Wars.

Photography from space exploration and science fiction blend freely in my first efforts.  As I make more fabrics for this series of quilts, I hope to find the quilt-like features of space exploration that we tend to overlook.  Most habitations, for example, come from archaeology or submarine design, and feature weapons as the most common human artifacts.  It will be good to nurture a different vision…

…a new commercial stencil (lower left) used on silk with Montana spray paint, Chroma-craft brushed on a blue background, and pentel dye sticks over a rosy dyed silk charmeuse.

I’m looking for overall patterns to use with more quilts in the Interstellar series.