The Quilted Line
Today I finished up the quilted sky, smoking camel on a billboard, hero sandwich, animal eyeballs, and the 90-minute binding. I’ve decided to call this The Food Pyramid: Another Mystery of the Not-So-Ancient World.
The problem with my quilts I’ve recently realized, is they are big and hard to convey in photographs. Everyone says they look better in person, so I’m experimenting with a new idea for how to take some detail photos. I got this idea from something I saw in a magazine — see if you can figure out what it is.
June has recently started an interesting discussion about the quilted line on the Ragged Cloth Cafe and the Art and Perception blog, so I thought I would post some bigger photos to show what I’m doing (click on a thumbnail to see a bigger image.) Here’s an example of the cryptic hieroglyphics that I was experimenting with in my last post.
I’m a little superstitious when I quilt — I don’t change my music in case it changes my “handwriting.” After the eightieth playback of U2′s Vertigo, I realized that the music selection wasn’t really arbitrary after all. Long ago when I went to Egypt on a college trip, I listened to U2 on my walkman almost the whole trip. Listening to their music again helped me on my meditative journey of quilted lines.
Inside the food pyramid, I echoed the shape of the foods, except occasionally I put decorative elements on the dishes and an M on the french fries. By the time I got to the filler part of the pyramid, I remembered that there were mazes inside some Egyptian tombs, so I stitched those in the background. They were fun to do, so may try this in a bigger way on my next quilt.
The real trick with the hieroglyphics was to find the right balance between the patterned background and the colors and weight of thread. What I wanted was for the hieroglyphics to be subtle or to appear and disappear, so they were secondary to the main figurative elements of the quilt. I don’t know if you can see it in the photo, but a bit of blue pops in and out because of the variegated thread.
I think the most difficult part of managing the quilted line is to control it and make it a part of a bigger whole. Like any other art form, it may be easy to master different segments of the craft, but difficult to put it together into a cohesive statement.
Your work never ceases to amaze and amuse me! You must have a rapier wit ! Your new pieces are truly fantastic. Congartulations on all of them !
The last paragraph says it all for me. As a quilter, there is so much to master and integrate, and the actual quilting line may be the hardest of all to get right.
I posted my copius notes from City and Guilds on Line on my blog . I have notes like this for eery element of design and planned to do a book one day or teach it
Hi Christine, I meant to put it in the post, but forgot. The quilt is 55″ tall, 60″ wide. It kind of got bigger than I wanted, but it’s still under the limit for the show I entered. Barely.
Wow, Pam that is a big quilt. What are the dimensions? Thanks for the photos showing the details, along with the explanations. Is that french fries in the lowest portion of the pyramid? Mmmm, now that’s my kind of food pyramid.
You’re right Natalya, I just saw a quilt photographed sideways in Quilting Arts Magazine. I don’t know why I never thought of it before since I think of my quilts as being three-dimensional. I was always taking the detail shot head-on, but you’re right, the texture gets lost that way.
This quilt is great, thank you for sharing your thoughts about it. I too love the variegated threads and use them with abandon…
and the new trick with the detail photos, are you taking them at an angle to show depth? I usually try to do that with my work, because I feel all the detail is lost straight on.
Good luck with the show you submitted it to!
Hi Del — well I have you to thank for pushing me into trying new colors and eventually completely re-designing my whole background to make it more dynamic. I had always been fascinated by Egyptian art, but when I finally got there and saw the sand dunes for real, that’s when I realized where certain characteristics in the sculptures came from. It would be interesting to study how the natural environment has influenced artists’ vocabulary.
Thanks for all your help!
Awesome – what a sand dune!
Seeing your quilts in-the-fabric was a revelation. I wish everyone could have a chance to study all the detail you include. Del
Exactly Pamelala! I often think about outsider artists who cover their painting or sculpture with complex patterns, some people call it a compulsion or a “horro vacuui†…fear of empty space! The artist I wrote about last month, Robert E. Smith, sometimes fills in empty spaces with a weird brick-like pattern that I think shows this tendency.
Because of the structure of quilts, sometimes we’re forced into that mentality, so I try to take it beyond quilting for quilting sake. But then sometimes I fall into the compulsive trap too.
Hi Pam,
I was interested in the idea that the quilting is downplayed so as to be a surprise to the viewer perhaps? I too am a dense sort of quilter and in the beginning would match the thread so the quilting was not noticeable at first. But then I discovered variegated thread! and choose thread now that has some interest in it’s own right. I still have to stop myself from loading on the images….on the fabric shapes too. My DH ( also an artist) says I have “horro vacuui” …fear of empty space! HaHa!
It depends – if it’s just a single black layer under another single layer, I’ll probably leave it there. But if there get to be a lot of objects stacked on top of one another, I may have to cut some out of the back because after about 6-7 layers of fabric, it starts to get difficult to sew through with the sewing machine (and forget any hand-embroidery!)
But if you’re going to cut out pieces behind, be sure to stand back and get a good look at everything. Up close it may look fine, but from a distance you may be able to see differences in the colors of fabric. I ran into this problem big time with the background, and had to add layers of fabric so strange shadows didn’t show through the light orange areas.
Someday, oh someday I’ll get to see a piece of your work in person.
About your black outline, do you leave the excess underneath, or cut away all the extra? It sets your work off wonderfully.
I like your clickable thumbnails, nice touch.
Quilting aside (which is wonderful) I love the graphic elements. The dog, the billboard, the hero…it all makes me smile!
Hi Deb, on many of my earlier quilts I matched the thread almost exactly to the backgrounds, but as I’ve gained confidence in my technique, I’ve been trying to branch out and use threads that show up more.
I find that if the thread matches the fabric too closely, I have trouble seeing what I’m doing, and get bored easily because it’s rather dull to create an effect that no one can really see, including myself!
My pieces are on the larger size too and I find that the stitched line has a tendency to disappear for all the trouble I go to. Do you find yourself matching the thread color to the background color to further dampen the effect of the stitched line?