8.5″ x 11″
2019
Not for sale
This third in my series of tiny rainbow photoquilts, this one follows a Bargello pattern, which bumps strips of differing widths up or down to create wave forms. The colored strips are from pictures of car roofs and hoods and the mostly-white strips are remnants from the photo printing process. These are some of the tiniest pieces of photo paper I’ve ever worked with.
Click on the links to see Rainbow #1 and Rainbow #2.
8″ x 10″
2019
Not for Sale / Private Collection
This is the second in a series of smaller rainbows I’m working on. The first was donated to the Ecole Kenwood Art Auction and was popular enough that I offered to make one for the second highest bidder as well. So, the school got double the donations, two people got a unique piece of art, and I discovered how popular rainbows are, which is fine with me because I love them too.
10″ x 7.5″
2018
Sold
This mini improv photoquilt was created for the silent auction at the Ecole Kenwood art show and sale where it was snapped up in a last-minute frenzy of bidding.
The rainbow is made from some of my favorite pieces to work with: photos of the colorful hoods, roofs, and trunks of hot rods and the white strips of photo paper that are cut from between photos when they are printed. For this photoquilt, I started with a rainbow of seven colors and then gradually added the strips until I was happy with the balance and the spacing. My original plan was to line the colors all up in parallel, but every time I laid them on my sewing table they all slid a little to one side or another and I found that I liked that arrangement better than the rigidity of the parallel structure, so I incorporated it into the final piece.
Because this piece was so popular at the auction, I’m currently working on more, one of which will be sold to the second highest bidder and those proceeds will also be donated to the school.
37″ x 42″
2018
Sold
This improvisational photoquilt went through several iterations before I was finally satisfied that it was complete. I began by cutting some squares out of pieces of photos of the sky that I took for Treetops / Snowflakes. Then I cut squares out of the squares and I noticed that by combining the squares and squares-in-squares from different photos of the sky, I could see how different the blues in each photo really were. In fact, the blue of the sky at one end of a photo could be several shades different from the sky at the other end. From there, I decided to see how it would look if I mixed in some red squares and I absolutely loved it — the colors vibrated next to each other. As I began to experiment with other colors, I realized that I had almost the whole rainbow, so I filled in the gaps. When I arranged the arc of the rainbow into a continuous ring, I knew I had it.
This photoquilt sparkles with the rainbow of color, the gloss of the prints, and the endless blue of the sky. The squares remind me of bubbles bursting at the top of a freshly-poured glass of soda pop. This will probably be the only photoquilt I ever describe as effervescent, but at least I can say I’ve made at least one.
detail