An "Art Quiltie"

What is an art quiltie? They are small fabric quilts, usually quite small, and are usually more often called fabric pages. They are sometimes more "mixed media" than traditional quilts and can mix fabrics, papers, paints, inks and just about anything else the artist wants to add.

I'm in a swap with an online group and we had to make one 6" x 6" quiltie. That was the only requirement - the theme, media and embellishments were all up to the maker. I finished mine last night and it did not come out at all like I had planned or envisioned!

I wanted to try a transfer on fabric but after a day of "playing" I had exactly one successful result to use. I took a flower photograph and transferred an inkjet copy of it to muslin using acrylic glaze medium. I taped down the muslin to a nonstick craft sheet and generously slathered a smooth application of the glaze medium on it. Then I coated the copy and laid it on top of the muslin, face down. I burnished this carefully and left it to dry for several hours. Once it was dry, I soaked it in warm water and then rolled off the paper backing with my fingers. This took some time, but eventually all paper bits were off.

The other technique I'd been wanting to try was making "paper fabric." I had seen this several times and there was a recent article in the May/June 09 issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors. Again I taped a small piece of muslin to the nonstick craft sheet and thinned down regular white glue with some water. I tore bits of sewing pattern tissue, other patterned tissue paper, some book text pages, pieces of a floral napkin and just some random bits on my work table and glued these to the muslin with a generous amount of diluted glue. I also covered the finished patchwork with more glue. When this was dry, I sprayed it with an olive colored Glimmer Mist. Remarkably, this remained soft and pliable and resulted in a nice, sturdy and colorful fabric/paper.

To assemble the art quiltie, I machine-stitched the floral transfer to the paper fabric and then outlined the main flower with a running stitch and sewed on beads in the center. Then I sewed these pieces to the background cotton quilting fabric and a thin piece of cotton batting. After embellishing with ribbon tacked down with little pearl beads and the vintage flower stem and fabric "yo yos", I backed it with a pink cotton quilting fabric and zig-zag stitched around the perimeter. The little hanger is one I've had for awhile and just love for small projects such as this.

If you click on any of the pictures, they will enlarge and you can see the detail of the beads as well as the shimmer of the glimmer mist. I love the different textures on this.

Here's a close-up of the yo-yos. I recently received these as a RAK from an online friend and they worked perfectly with this color scheme! I sewed some little vintage buttons which look like pearls to the centers. Thank you Elaine!

The due date is May 16 and this went out in the mail today. Second swap I've been early for recently! This one's going to Brenda and I hope she likes it. I can't wait to see the one I receive!