Design Concept

This is one of a series of quilts about birds as symbols of freedom and the joy if life. In this quilt the birds are very abstract, and function as graphic design elements. The forms are intentionally ambiguous, so that each viewer can use her/his own experience with birds to guess their species. Even the number of birds in the quilt is subject to interpretation.

The colors represent the spectral colors of refracted light The darker values of red and purple begin at the bottom of the quilt, and graduate through orange and yellow in the center to blue and green at the top.

The machine quilting was done with over 100 different colors of Madeira Poly-Neon thread. In the feathers of the birds the quilting is reminiscent of the traditional "Feathered Plume" quilting pattern.

On the back of the quilt is a single piece of cotton fabric, hand painted in a rainbow of colors, echoing the colors of the birds on the front of the quilt.

At the AQS show in 2000, the most frequently asked question was "How long did it take?"  This is not a simple question to anwser.  It took approximately two weeks (8-16 hours per day) to do the machine quilting.  It took approximately four weeks, full time, to piece it.  It took approximately one week to draw the design, and ten years to figure out how to draw the design.  Learning to make the quilt in this amount of time took twenty years of practice.

Process and technical details:

	I began this design by drawing a number of abstract birds on paper.
Each bird drawing was scanned into the computer, and I spent several hours playing with various combinations of birds.  In addition to overlapping each other, the birds were mirror imaged, rotated, and resized to find a harmonious arrangement.

The arrangement I liked the best was printed out, and I continued the drawing by hand, filling in negative spaces, removing lines I didn't like, and adding connections.

The line drawing was rescanned and converted to a vector drawing using Adobe Streamline.  In Corel Draw, I colored the spaces between the lines in shades of black white and gray.  I used this value study as a guide as I chose the colors and values for this quilt. 

The line drawing was printed onto acetate, and projected onto a large piece of paper (72" x 93") using an overhead projector.  Using a pencil, I drew the major design lines. 

The big drawing was then put on the floor of my studio and I spent several hours refining the drawing and making any changes necessary due to change of scale. I used this one original drawing as my actual pattern.  I don't make a second copy.  I feel that by using only the original I get very precise accuracy in piecing the templates together, and my quilt tops lie absolutely flat when they are complete.

Constructing the Quilt:

The pieces were sewn together in each section as I went along, so they didn't get confused. When two or three sections were complete, I sewed them together into larger sections.

I'm using fabrics in every color of the rainbow and every value from very light to very dark.  For luminosity, I'm using almost every solid and varigated gradation I have on my shelf.  I  also pulled out lots and lots of multicolored painted fabric, and it's all in a jumble on the floor of my studio.  I need to have visual contact with it as I work.