Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Inspiration for art quilts

I've been having a lot of fun making mixed media art quilts this year.  Nests, in particular, appealed to me and have kept my creative juices flowing.  My nest series includes all kinds of natural and man made fibers and all kinds of techniques.  Do you want to know how I get my inspiration for each quilt?  

Pictures that I take on walks along with concepts for inspiration have been a great combination for me.  For this quilt, my husband suggested “renewed”’. It was a beautiful spring day and the cherry trees were in full bloom when I took this great shot of the tree backlit by the sun which I used as a starting point.  


I thought about baby birds in their nests and how the life cycle of birds is renewed each spring.  So I sketched some ideas incorporating the combination of my photo and the inspiration of the baby birds.


It is usually pretty fun to figure out how to create my mixed media pieces once I have a sketch.  I gather up a pile of things then audition and play until it looks good.  For this piece, I made the tree with vintage seam binding that was cut and raveled and added blossoms with several pink fabrics.  After quilting,  different colors of beads were hand stitched to the centers of each blossom and added as eyes to the baby birds.  The nest plays a small role on this quilt and was made by melting a black hair net with some Angelina fibers directly onto the quilt.  


I hope you like it!