Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Dreamtime


Hello friends! What do you make of this curious fabric? A friend sent it to me as a souvenir of her recent trip “Down Under.”


It’s an Australian aboriginal print featuring witchetty grubs, honey ants, snakes, lizards, and other symbols of indigenous culture--in other words, not my typical quilting fare.


I’d seen distinctive prints like this (African fabrics, Kaffe Fassett florals) successfully used in quilts before, generally to showcase a collection of designs. —a “more is more” approach to design. In my case



Ultimately, I maintained the integrity of the piece by keeping the fabric intact. Who am I kidding... I couldn't bear to cut it up! Instead, I framed the piece with a sawtooth border made of even brighter colors. 



I tried adding pieced blocks but they only made the quilt look busier. So, I pieced together the Broken Dishes blocks I had made and put them on the back of the quilt.





The machine quilting was a lot of fun to do. I stitched random wavy lines with a variety of threads. It not only added great texture but contributed to the freeform style.


Dreamtime
16” x 23”
© DJB, 2003


9 comments:

  1. ooo - that quilting is inspired for that quilt! And I LOVE aboriginal fabrics! My friend who lives in AU sends them to me sometimes. I"ve made some really fun quilts with them.

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  2. This one is so jazzy...I really like it. Grubs, huh, my 4 year old went on a stint of always telling me there were grubs in our compost pile, just to hear me scream in disgust. The white, the black...very freaky.

    But what a beautiful quilt!

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  3. What a great solution to keep the fabric design in tact and now you have a reversible quilt!

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  4. Love the fabric,love what you did with it,Wig.

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  5. I'm glad you didn't cut the fabric, it looks great with the triangle border around it. The aborigines eat witchety grubs- Yuck, no thanks!

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  6. great quilt. you did an amazing job of highliting the fabric and yet making a fun quilt all at the same time. marvelous.

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  7. Hi, I just found your blog through Tonya. Just want to say you made a great quilt with that Aussie fabric. I love the uneven points.

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