Civic Duty, 16x16
This quilt has become all the more relevant today as the horrendous news comes out of Washington today. The US will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. This decision takes the country backwards and I am furious. If I had room I would have put "as if your grandchildren's lives depend on it". It's possible that if the 50% of Americans that did not vote in the 2016 election had exercised their civic duty we wouldn't be in this mess.
This is my entry for the Quilt Alliance contest this year with the theme "Voices". I have added this to my Threads of Resistance series even though it was not made for that exhibit. I will keep adding to this political body of work as time goes on.
This quilt is hand appliqued, hand embroidered, and hand quilted. The letters VOTE are hand appliqued. The other letters were created with a layering technique that I learned in a class with Heidi Parkes at QuiltCon. I don't think she fuses her shapes to the batting, but I did because I didn't want the letters to shift during quilting. I used my stencil set to cut out the letters and fused them directly to the batting. Then I layered over it a very thin shot cotton (Kaffe Fassett). I appliqued VOTE to the shot cotton before I layered it all and started hand quilting. I bought only two sizes of the stencils and this is the smaller size. The capital letters measure 2.75" tall. As it was, I had to play with the layout to get the words to fit within the 16x16 parameters for the contest.
In the end, while this was a technique I wanted to try, I'm not sure it works as well as I would have hoped for a word quilt This is the sort of quilt that invites closer inspection and so it works well that way, but from a distance it's hard to see the layered words and lighting makes a huge difference. I decided to hand quilt with red thread around "life" because it needed more color. I used pearl cotton for all the stitching on this piece and I love the bold line it makes.
I will be mailing this off to the Quilt Alliance tomorrow. The contest deadline has been extended to July 3rd if you decide to raise your voice and let your opinions and thoughts be known. All the contest quilts are donations to the Quilt Alliance and will be auctioned off this fall.
