I am continuing my study of twentieth century artists and art movements as inspiration and learning a lot. This quilt is based on Cubism which we studied recently in the history of art group I belong to. The Cubists were mainly concerned with line and form (shape) which are two elements of design central to quilting. Their work was often done in tones of brown and grey but I decided that using shades of one colour as we have to this year would be fine. Although their work was primarily abstract, various symbols frequently appear and I thought I would try and incorporate some of these. They include music, print and newspaper headlines. Still life is also a common subject so that's what I chose.
I raided the refrigerator for a vegetable or two and bought some tulips. I then drew the picture freehand.
You will see that this drawing includes a piece of music stave and a long column on the right on which I planned to write a 'headline'. I was thinking of stencilling and Markal paintsticks but I soon realised that the main challenge for this piece was the A4 size. There is a lot of detail in the picture and fitting it all in was obviously impossible. So, as so often happens with quilts, various things got eliminated. I was also keen to use commercial fabrics as a change from all the hand-dyed ones of previous months. In my stash I found some Lenni Rossi fabrics which I bought over five years ago. These had print on them. I also had a piece of 'stave' fabric and the 'tablecloth' is from the collection that the V and A museum issued to go with their exhibition some time ago. I see that you can still buy some of this fabric on-line. http://www.vandashop.com/
I pieced the background and then collaged the rest, cutting templates from photocopies of the drawing. How simple things are with modern technology! Everything is machine stitched which was a complete change from the hand stitched March quilt. Now that I have finished these four red quilts, I am left with a wide variety of pieces of red fabric, mainly from my dyeing session. I will have to think whether I have any more 'red' quilts in my head. The next task is to dye yellows as that is the colour for the second four quilts.. I used up a lot of my yellow stash last year making a bed quilt and need to think about what types of fabric I am likely to use. 'Shades of yellow' is also an interesting challenge as I assume it includes orange but that can so easily turn into browns.
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