A quilt design of gumnuts and peppercorn leaves

from w
I put together some of the pictures based on photos I took in the street where we live - gumnuts from a tree, peppercorn leaves from a huddle of trees near the flats up the street. (And Peceli's pumpkin leaves and tips before the extraordinary 48 degrees centigrade on that Black Saturday got to them.) The technique of combining pictures that have been manipulated and put together in a mosaic using Picasa would be an easy way to make a design for a quilt - that's well before all the real hard work. Now wouldn't Picasso have a great time with modern technology!

Quilt

from w
The women of the Interfaith group in Geelong recently made a quilt - each member making one square or hand etc. and one of the women put all the pieces together.

Designing a quilt

from w
Playing around with photo-edit a bit with my drawings and a pic of gingko leaves to make a quilt design - but only in the ether, not for real. Perhaps click to look at the details. Some pics are doubled up, I know! And there's no real unity - this is just a random selection thrown together by Picasa's collage click.

(written later-Saturday evening)

Things I noticed at the exhibition. 'A girl never has too much fabric.' 'Dyed and gone to heaven'. One banner called 'Lost for Words' was about Alzheimer's and the artist even embroidered the broken script of her father. A banner/quilt that attracted a lot of attention was of mushrooms and a mouse with exquisite stitching and three-dimensional areas on the toadstools. 'Australian Bounty' was a delightful quilt on a black background with Australian animals, birds, and insects with colours graded from warm to cool.

A problem with many of the items, to me anyway, was the use of too many colours which seemed to fight against one another. Those with a limited palette seemed to work best. These craftswomen are so smart, so careful, so dedicated, yet I felt that many of the actual designs needed more thought as you don't really have make a realistic scene with stitching because the medium has other possibilities especially for fantasy. References to the real world - okay - but there's more! But overall it was a joy to walk around the exhibition to celebrate the amazing craftwork that women have been able to do with fabrics and thread.