Painted Applique

Here is a queen sized quilt I recently finished and sent off for my sister and her husband. It started with a 5" charm pack of Moda fabrics that she gave to me. I set them on point, added solid blocks, surrounded all that with red, added a pieced strip on 2 sides to set it all off center, added an outer border with 2 different widths, painted an applique (inspired by Helen Stubbing and her book Faux Applique) added pieced blocks in one corner for variety. For quilting, I used an allover flower/leaf and a quilt technique from Helen Stubbing's book in the border. Quilting detail and the quilt on a bed are pictured below. And all this in a week!!!

Pieced Window - plus Another Portrait

My sister and her husband own a beautiful home in Colorado - on one wall are two wide, short windows. Rather than plain glass, they are pieced - I don't call them stained glass as there is no color in the glass. For their Christmas gift, I have made a version of one of the windows in cloth. (Detail above, full piece shown below.) It is machine pieced and heavily machine quilted. The final piece measures 18" by 36" - I hope they will use it for a tablerunner on their dining room table, below the windows.

I chose to reproduce the window without 'color' = I used 4 grey fabrics. One of those has some subtle yellow in it - emphasized by using a pale yellow thread to quilt it. This is my first 'larger' piece using wool batting - what wonderful batting!!!

Trying to understand the differences between artquilts and traditional quilts - as I was working on this piece, I thought to reproduce the window in a painting would be boring. But to reproduce the window as a sculpture would/could be truly beautiful. And I think reproducing it as a quilted piece works really well. So, is the art of quilting more like sculpting?

This is a portrait of my daughter, painted in acrylic - from an Easter picture when she was about 8 years old - she will turn 30 in January. My painting shows her sitting on the bank of the Cacapon River - a scene from my imagination only.