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GROUP QUILT - FALLEN IDOLS
Christine, Susan, Janet, Lyn
Christine: My starting point was the Chimu
Indian site of Chan Chan in Peru. It looks like a red mud hillside with pronounced strata, and it is only at close quarters that the city ruins become apparent - and then you see that it was an enormous and
sophisticated place. With the sun on the hillside, the strata glow. My idea was that the city ruins look natural, if dramatic, until you look closely - and then you see how that mighty place has decayed. I made two
virtually identical strip-pieced squares, cut and rejoined to suggest the strata, and using a mix of cottons and silks.
Susan: I felt that the strata were not dramatic
compared with the original idea, even rather timid, so taking my courage in both hands I cut the piece up and rejoined it in a more jagged and haphazard way, so that it wasn't square or straight-edged any more.
Janet: I left the disjointed shape of the
quilt, and I worked on the rock strata idea, by adding a rock fall with fabric caught under a layer of net.
Lyn: I struggled with this piece - wasn't
happy with it, so in the end, I trimmed some of the original pieces out of the bottom to straighten it up, and reappliqued them on top to extend the rockfall.
Christine: I was really astonished when the
piece came back - at least partly because it was smaller than when it went away! Eventually, I unpicked some of the rockfall and rearranged it nearer the bottom of the piece, and then I chopped it up a bit more and
appliqued it on to a stormy orange background to enhance the earthquake effect. Then I added some gold fabric and embroidery to suggest the fallen civilisation, and swirly quilting, so the idea returned to where it
started.
INDIVIDUAL QUILT - FANTASIA ON GEE'S BEND
Christine: Quite a long time had passed before I
worked on my own quilt, and I had visited the Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibition in the US recently. I decided to modify my original idea as a homage to the African-American women of Gee's Bend, Alabama, who had
laboured so superbly under conditions of desperate poverty to make their wonderful and life-enhancing scrap quilts. My final quilt is inspired by Annie Mae Young's work, but she used her husband's old workclothes
whereas I had the luxury of my own hand-dyed and painted fabrics. The quilting follows the shape of the Gee's Bend route of the Alabama River on which the settlement was built
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