Zen Garden

You all know that I joined ALQS2 (Another Little Quilt Swap 2), don't you? I was in the Art Quilt section. Since I have already received my little art quilt (you can read about it in this post) I thought I should tell you about the one I just sent out.

Like I normally do, I stalked the blog of my swap partner. She likes nature and when I saw her February 2008 post, I knew exactly what I was going to do. You see, I happen to have 9 of these bamboo tops. Yes, you read that correctly -- nine. This is the only one with the dragonfly on it, however.

Here's the back story on all these little quilt tops. I have a degree in art although I make stupid mistake as in this case. I was taking a design class and as part of my final art project I proposed a king sized quilt that was, in essence, a large nine-patch made of rectangles with a large border popped onto it. As a new quilter, I really underestimated the time it would take to complete the WHOLE project and was only able to get this block painted onto muslin.

But I gave a presentation to the instructor showing the block and the rest of the design and he bought into it and I got an 'A' in the class and graduated. I finished painting the other 8 blocks and completed the top and it became my oldest UFO: 25 years. I once pulled it out of the closet hung it on the wall and thought that if I over-dyed it. would I like it better? I over-dyed it green and still didn't like it. Another time, I pulled it out and it hung on the design wall for months before it FINALLY dawned on me what was wrong: scale.

Scale is one of the principles of design and I had totally ignored it in the big picture of a whole quilt. I did not have a king-sized quilt top with borders. What I had was 9 small quilt tops!! Plus some odd shaped pieces that were former borders.

So, Debbie, received a hand painted quilt, the first in a series called 'Zen Garden'. It is painted using Deka Fabric Paints which are no longer available in the US. I over-dyed it with Procion MX Fiber Reactive Dyes. It is the approximate size of a fat quarter, maybe a bit smaller. I machine quilted more bamboo into the background and then filled in with a stipple. The painted dragonfly is a simple couched embellishment, using two different weights of Kreinik thread.

There is one thing you may not have noticed: a lack of a binding. I did not want a binding to catch the eye so I faced the quilt using the bits leftover from when I squared up the quilt. I like the way it turned out.

It is so simple. So zen.