Crosses Galore

Crosses are so common in quilt-making. And I have made my fair share of them. At first as conventional bed quilts & then as departures onto walls.

The first departures were a seasonal set: first Fall Cross.             

  Then Summer Cross.

Spring Cross

Winter Cross

You can probably see now I am keeping some design elements constant. I think this was my first self-conscious series of quilts. Very fun to do.

       Summer Scraps grew out of much sewing one summer & scraps galore floating around.                                                                    

Here are old-time utility quilt fashioned a bit after the Amish style. I did these ones back in the 1970s. I see them now as sweet & naive.

In the same vein I made Byzantine Summer Fantasy which I gave to my sister Annie. It had some plaid silk in the patchwork & was embellished with sequins & beads.

 

Later I was inspired by something Joanna Steniskis made. I gathered her idea & some wonderful quotes from pre-school children & made this: The Tapestry of Children. This photo was taken when the piece was partially quilted up.

A quilt I gave my friend Judy MacIntosh. These have 4-patches making up 9-patches-- 9 blocks of them.

Dancing Under the African Sky. This was given to my cousin's daughter who was marrying a man from [then] Zaire. Not quite a cross, but the sense of 4 directions is strong.

These four are very much from the same period.

 

When my mother died in 1981 I made this 4-directions quilt about her & her 4 children going in their 4 directions. In this image it is hung in a window!

This quilt I made to raffle off as a fundraiser for a play-gound-building project. Quite dramatic on a bed.

These last two crosses were made at the beginning of my breaking-out period where I was trying out various new modalities.

 

That's it for now.

Layers or hozontal organizations

 There aren't so many of these, somehow I must gravitate more to the vertical. 

I have no record of what I called this, but I know I was thinking of turquoise buried in layers of New Mexico rock.

This one I called Swedish Summer.

And Butterscotch Mountains.

Hands Across the World

Red Sticks Walking also has layers (& more).

That's it for now.

Pillars & Totems, another quilty form

 I guess columns are, in design terms, even simpler than arrays. I have done many projects using this form.

Here is one called One-&-a-Half Red Dots. My keyboard won't let me write it the way I like to with the one over the two. 1/2 just doesn't cut it!! 

Butterscotch Totems was another.

This one I called Totems. I can see now that the elements are totemic, but not so much the overall form!

I also made some transparent totems in a very similar vein.

I have done a lot with confetti in my work. It must come from wanting to use up scraps. I wasn't born in New England, as a post WW2 baby for nothing! This one was called Rainbow Confetti.

Confetti with Bridesmaids had some of the same feel & is way more successful, I think now.

I did 3 waltz quilts. "Waltz" because they featured triangles, as in One, two, three, One, two three.

 

These three waltz quilts were made with home dyed-&-printed cloth, so here are three details.

Green Trees is very much in the same vein.

Red Veins [bleed] was very columnar, even if a bit wavy.

Occasionally I make "utility" quilts. This one was made with marvelous handwoven ikat cloth from Thailand. I used this quilt many, many times for naps.

One unusual quilt I made was inspired by very tightly braiding strips of white cloth together & dipping the braid into an indigo vat. The unbraided stops were sewn together & very pleasing pattern emerged.

Another simply structured quilt I made using "paste resist" [not wax resist that you may be familiar with in the look of batik.]

That's it for now.