I was asked to submit a quilt for the up coming exhibition in Cork a while ago. The theme for this exhibition was “North, South, East and West”.
Around that time a lot of story went around about building a wall to divide. I was very upset. Walls to divide East and West. Walls to divide South and North.
When the Berlin wall came down, I was at uni and watched that news non stop. It was so emotional and the sense of relief was huge. Something new was started.
Now somebody wants to build a wall rather than talk to solve the problem. I can only hope it won’t happen.
I had a image of three primary colours mixing to create more colour for this quilt. But colours were separated by walls but cracks and holes of the walls letting colour to escape and mix.
I had to make this quilt to 12″ by 24″. Quilting shrinks quilt and that means I had to make this quilt a bit bigger and trim back to the size which is not quite straight forward since I don’t know the amount of shrinkage.
Initially I was going to cut fabrics to 1.5″ squares and piece them neatly to create my view. But that looked like a very slow process and I didn’t have much time to make this quilt. So improvised piecing was the way. And that way I had to make everything extra bigger to have enough space for trimming before quilting.
My scrap boxes were turned upside down again and I scavenged as well as some fabrics were cut from bolts because I needed certain ones. Yes some more fabrics were added back to scrap boxes! No end of them….
The first one I made was yellow to green block.
And then green to blue to purple.
Purple to red to orange.
And orange to yellow.
And there were walls, grey walls. Very rough looking quilt top isn’t it.
Quilting was doodling style with matching thread since I didn’t want to add any more colours and if I use matching thread, quilting won’t show up that much. And that is a reminder of graffiti on walls.
It was blocked, squared, trimmed and bound. I will have proper pictures of finished quilt when the exhibition is open( will let you know the detail when I know for certain).
