Unity Challenge

Earlier this year I joined SAQA which is an international art quilting group. Although I am known for my traditional quilts I do a lot of art quilting on the side especially with the Waverley Art Quilters. I decided to take the next step and join SAQA. Most of the SAQA members live in America but there is a growing number of members from Australia and we are in the Oceania group.

The Oceania group opened a Facebook page where we could connect with others in the group and get to know each other. A challenge was decided upon and the theme was Unity. Luckily it only had to be a small 8"x 10" because like everyone else I don't have a lot of spare time.

I have done quite a bit of study on the principals and elements of design and Unity is not mentioned very often.

The book called The Quilters Book of Design by Ann Johnston has an entire chapter on Unity and she says that Unity is achieved by the lines, shapes, colours, values, texture and patterns that are used.

Sandra Meech in her Connecting Design to Stitch book says that unity makes everything work together and until there is Unity the piece is not finished.

I am still having fun with my Gelli printing and decided to use those fabrics. I pulled out some blues and yellows and decided on a music theme. I had some  stamps, stencils and thermofax screens with music motifs and used them with the Gelli plate.

Some of my fabrics were a strange shape and I wondered if crazy patchwork would work in an art quilt and thought this was a chance to try it out.

I pieced the fabrics together and this is what I made.

Music- 1st Attempt

As you can see I had quilted it and although I was trying to achieve Unity with the complimentary colour scheme and the music theme I thought it was unbalanced. I felt that there was too much blue in the top left corner and not enough in the bottom right.

I fixed the problem by adding some blue to the bottom right corner and quilted over the top. Quite an easy fix really.

Music balanced

I added some white dots of paint to give the piece some movement.

A few days later when I looked again at my music piece I thought the treble clef stamp that I used in the middle was not dark enough, so I added some Lumiere paint to add a bit more colour.

Bye for now,
Linda