CREATIVE FABRIC ART: Fractured Art Quilts

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

8 hours of intense labor!

I have been thinking of learning how to make a small basket for Jackson's fracture which I am working on. Last week I went to Madonnna Needle Works in Morgan Hill, CA, and a woman was teaching a class in making minature baskets. Nancy Jones, the teacher, offered to give me a private lesson on coiling baskets on Sunday. Of course I felt like a total klutz, but Nancy was very patient with me. After 5 hours I had the start of a basket, about 1" in diameter! Not fast work, but I did enjoy it. I worked on it some more on Monday just to cement the process in my head and it is now about 2". I think I would like to make it between 4-5" and see how it looks. It is something which I think that I will enjoy pursuing. I thought it was very funny that a non-Indian taught me how to coil a basket! Go figure. Thanks Nancy, you are a great teacher, and I have made a new friend.

I also worked on finishing the moccasins for Young Buck and have temporarily attached them to him. I am very happy with them, now I need to finish the arm bands, which is also proving to be lots of work and size 14 beads are itsy, bitsy things! I will work on shading once I have attached him permanently to the quilt piece. I feel like I am really making progress on him, but I need to put him away and finish a couple of odds and ends on the rest of the fractures before I get to Klamath Falls.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Fractured Quilt 2010

I have been a member of a Fractured Art Quilt group for about four years now. The group began with six members in the first year. At the end of the first projects, three of the members dropped out and we decided to replace only two of them. Three of the original members have continued with the group to complete a total of three pieces and others have either one or two pieces which they have finished.

Each member designs a pattern and then fractures it into five pieces. One piece of each persons' pattern is given to each participant. (This means that each person works on every pattern including their own.) The originator of the pattern establishes what guidelines, if any, they have for their original piece. Everyone has about ten months to finish all five pieces and return them to their respective owners. Each individual then puts their fractured pieces back together and does the finishing quilting and embellishing.

The fractured quilts which have been completed to date were shown at a special exhibit at the Sisters Quilt Show in Sisters, OR last summer. They were very well received and we have since begun work on next years fractures. I am posting pictures of the pieces which were completed since the group began.