Welcome to my stop on the Art with Fabric Blog Hop!
I’m participating in the Spring 2018 edition of the Art with Fabric blog hop, organized and hosted by Alida of Tweety Loves Quilting.
Alida has lined up a number of quilter-artists, and has asked each of us to create a quilt or fabric project inspired by “traditional” (i.e. non-textile) art – such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, architecture, music, books from all countries and all time periods.
The Spring 2018 blog hop runs from May 21 to 24, with 3 or 4 artists blogging each day about their artwork and inspiration.
Check Alida’s Art with Fabric blog hop page for the complete schedule and links to all the participants’ blogs. Alida also has links to all the art-inspired quilted pieces from previous blog hops.
I’m glad that Alida included architecture as one of the inspirational sources, because I love to make art quilts inspired by architecture, especially bridges.
My piece is titled Jade Sky at Night and features the Pattullo Bridge, located in New Westminster BC, where I live. The bridge is a beautiful structure, with its graceful arched shape, intricate angled beams, and distinctive colors. The Pattullo was designed by supervising engineer Major W.G. Swan, and it opened in 1937. You can read more about the history of the bridge here and here.
Below is a photo I took of the Pattullo Bridge. Using photo editing software, I cropped the image, then enhanced it by boosting the contrast and using a Neon effect to change the colors.
I printed the image on fabric, fused the printed image to acrylic felt, and quilted the outlines of the bridge and the clouds.
I mounted the piece onto a 12” x 12” x 1.5” gallery wrapped canvas, using Susan Carlson’s technique described in this blog post https://susancarlson.com/2017/08/26/hang-it-up/ which describes several methods of hanging and displaying quilts. (The back of Susan’s frame looks much neater than mine – I obviously need more practice with this technique. But it looks great from the front!)
This beautiful bridge is slated for demolition and replacement in the next few years, so I plan to take a lot more photos to use as source material for future art quilts.
Visit the blogs of today’s other artists to see what artwork they’ve been inspired by:
Shannon: http://imworkingonaproject.
Bea: http://www.beaquilter.com/
You have really brought this bridge to life in your fabric art.
Terry! Your bridge quilt is lovely. It almost looks like Batik, what a fun way to edit the picture. The colors are great too. I recently did a gallery wrapped finish on a portrait quilt (after taking a Susan Carlson class of course) but somehow I did the corners wrong and wound up with little pooching out bits of the edge fabric at each corner. I think I’d better read the instructions better next time, but I love the finish that gives.
Excellent work! I’ve never seen this technique so I’ve filed it away in prospects.
I like how you explained the hop, I’m going to edit my post so I give more background info. Look for me on Thursday.
Really cool! And thank you for sharing the canvas wrapping link. I’m always looking for new ways to do things
Wow! I think this is my favorite of all your work I’ve seen.
Lovely!!! How did you print your picture on fabric?
I use commercial fabric that has been pre-treated for use in inkjet printers and has a paper backing that makes it easy to feed through the printer.
What a creative idea! I’ve never painted on fabric, but it looks like it would be something fun to explore. Great idea capturing this bridge before its demolition.
I’ve never painted directly on fabric either. I do my artistic enhancement of the photo using my computer, then I print the image onto commercially prepared fabric with my inkjet printer.
truly Amazing, I love the process you took to recreate the bridge. How sad that they are demolishing it, but you’ll have a wonderful reminder of the bridge to look at. I have always been fascinated by bridges.
Wonderful piece!
I absolutely love how you are always able to capture the feeling of these huge architectural structures in a small fabric piece!! So vibrant and beautiful!! Thanks for joining the blog hop!!