Whisper Quilts Revealed

I went to the regional SAQA meeting Saturday in Elk Grove. The main feature was the revealing of the Whisper Quilt Challenge. I forgot to hand my camera over to someone when I was holding up the group of quilts I was in, but managed to get this snapshot of the quilts stacked on the table afterwards. I will talk a bit about the quilts shown here. I believe better photos of all of the quilts will soon be up on our SAQA blog. I will link there when they are up.

Four different groups all started with the same photo of a desert garden, and all went in four different directions.

Marjorie Johnson’s quilt is shown on the top of the stack. You can see her full quilt on her website. She says she had a hard time trying to find cactus fabrics to add to her collaged desert landscape. And then she added some animals to put life into the quilt.

Cynthia Long did a value study of Marjorie’s quilt, and discharged a piece of silk to replicate the pattern of values she saw. She then added lots of wonderful detail with additional paint (or dye maybe?) and lots of wonderful hand stitching.

Carol Larson focused on some painted and stitched details from Cynthia’s quilt, and made it the main focus of her own quilt. She worked in similar colors as Cynthia. Just a hint of the original landscape is showing in the green hill-like shape at the bottom of her quilt.

Liz Berg did away altogether with the landscape idea. She continued with Carol’s circle motif, and added some long curvy shapes. Her full quilt is shown on her blog at the bottom of this post.

My first thought about Liz’s quilt was of sea kelp and bubbles, but I didn’t wasn’t real interested in doing kelp, and waited a couple of days to see if any other ideas would emerge. The colors and shapes in Liz’s quilt reminded me of a piece of fabric I had with random circles printed across it. And then the fabric reminded me of a lone allium plant with two straggly leaves growing down the street. I pulled out lots of coordinating polka dot prints, and added a drift of circles behind the main flower. Liz’s long curvy shapes became the stem and leaves of my allium.