National Quilt Museum (Part 2); Non-Traditional Quilts

We’re back at the National Quilt Museum for round two featuring art quilts made by women, out of fabric and thread, creativity and patience. Today’s post focuses on non-traditional quilting of various kinds.

Let’s kick it off with this one, a “small quilt” about 18 x 18 inches, which is why you see that nickel in the bottom right corner. It gives perspective to just how small those little squares actually are! Small quilts are exercises in patience as well as nimble fingers! The title “Eat More Carrots” comes from the author’s complaint to her friend that black-on-black quilting was a challenge to the eyes. The friend responded with “eat more carrots” and so the title was born.

One of the pioneers of machine quilting is Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry, who pioneered machine quilting, both in piecing and in quilting. Her works are explosions of color, often focusing on geometric designs, like this one. Looking at this piece close up, it is definitely a work of art! I can’t imagine this on a bed, ever. It’s an art quilt, meant for display and enjoyment.

As machine quilters expanded in numbers, they brought new depth and originality to quilting, creating works that would never be finished if you’d had to make them by hand. Here’s one beautiful example of how machine quilting gives depth to the petals of the pink flowers and the green leaves.

Take a close-up look and you can see the mechanics of how the flowers were made. First, she used the technique of whole cloth painting to create the shades and shapes of the flowers, using silk fabric. Notice how the middle lighest piece goes from white to light blue to light red; that’s all painted on fabric, rather than the traditional piecing of different fabrics to get variations in color.

Once the flowers were painted on the fabric, she used machine quilting to outline and fill in the flowers, petal by petal. She said it took one month to paint the quilt and four months to do the domestic machine quilting. She dedicated this quilt  to her two aunts,  Aunt Esther and Aunt Helen, who died within a month of each other. She worked through her sadness by making this quilt, thinking of her aunts twirling around in a joyous dance, the Twirly Girls of the quilt’s title.

Last quilt featured in this post uses traditional piece of fabric to get that amazing rainbow of colors, but the quilting is what’s non-traditional.

In this quilt of feathers, the artist uses embroidery thread and stitches to outline and emphasize the shapes. She also uses raw-edge collage, meaning that the edges of each piece of fabric are “sewn into” the adjoining pieces rather than being seamed from behind, as in traditional quilting. Both techniques combine to make a beautiful, textured piece, inspired, the artist writes, by the Nicobar Pigeon’s neck feathers.

I’ll finish off with this one, a detail of a quilt where I’ve lost the name/artist. The non-traditional part of this one is those gold beads sewed into the triangle shapes. It’s a small touch, but a fun one that makes it feel like a jester’s cap to me, and that made me smile.

One more post to go in Quilt-land, stay tuned!

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You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

Maya Angelou