“Altered Shapes” Exhibition
Fertility Quilt by
Fertility Quilt by
18" x 18" © 2004
This quilt is my first real “art” quilt. It began at a FAN retreat held in Saskatoon. The workshop director, Judy Morningstar, told the participants to find an interesting shape, to repeat it many times and then to find a way to arrange it using a variety of possible techniques.
I found the central shape in a piece of grill work in the hotel and imagined it to be Shakepeare’s “Comedy”. I rounded the nose to make it more useable, repeated the shape several times as instructed (I designed the shape to look like mushrooms which looked good using the autumn scraps I had brought) and then arranged them on a piece of complementary fabric (blue).
Soon other participants started making comments about it being fetus’. They ended up in a circle and I thought this to be possible so I added a blue and a pink one to the mixture. Then I remembered that four days earlier, I had seen my daughter’s ultrasound of her baby, our first grandchild, and it had one arm uplifted and actually looked like this mushroom!
So I added a metallic piece for the umbilical cord, some dark organdy for the placenta (a nurse in the group suggested that it needed a placenta) and the rest took shape with great joy!
