I find inspiration in a lot of places. Sometimes, it’s a lovely leaf or fern combination. It could also be the perfect juxtaposition of textures against a rock when you look up close and personal. (There can be a whole world in a few square inches of a moss covered surface.) Other times, I’ll glance over at my fabric stash and have to do something with a certain piece of fabric that I bought a while back. During those times, I start pulling out other fabrics to go with that “starter fabric” and pretty soon, my studio floor is covered in a lovely pile of fabric, ribbon, trim, and of course, my favs, the buttons. Those are all my “paints” for my creation, and the cutting out commences. That original piece of fabric may or may not end up in the final piece, but at least, it was the starting point.
This piece, known as “Hot Jazz”, was created because of some music that I heard in a dream. I’ve always been blessed with lucid dreams, and can remember pieces of some that occurred over 30 years ago. (Once, I dreamed a whole movie, and another time a whole book). These snippets, or “dream visions” have been the source of many of my pieces. “Hot Jazz” however, was different in that it had music accompanying it. I guess it was really more Ragtime music, but after cutting out the piece, “Hot Jazz” sounded better as a title. (Sometimes, the title comes before the piece has been started, while here it came after the piece was well underway.)
I happen to have some fabric that had a musical keyboard motif on in, so those lengths were added early on. I was playing with the decorative stitches on my new Bernina sewing machine at the time, so there are vertical elements that cut through the keyboards and make them seem a little disjointed, just as they would in a dream. Other shiny elements were added to symbolize how music often circles back as it plays with a theme and so I used some circles and half circles to symbolize that concept. This piece was completed in 1998 (and quickly sold), so it doesn’t have as many buttons on it as my pieces do now. It certainly made up for any lack of buttons and beads with the interesting textures created with the machine embroidery, which is a design element that I’m thinking about returning to re-explore in some of my newer art quilts.
To see more of my art work, please visit my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com .