Poppies

Most of my time at the moment is taken up with preparing pieces for a talk I will be giving to my local Quilters Guild at the end of February. I will be discussing some of the many different ways there are for adding colour to fabric to use in our quilts/textile pieces.

As I work under the name Quilt Routes I am basing the pieces around my travels, this one being France.

I know it is a bit of a cliche but I always love seeing the poppies by the side of the road and it seemed a quick and easy topic to delve into.

Based on the work of Carol Weibe and her Cracked Paper Quilts I made the following piece. It hasn't had a lot of thought put into it design wise, but was done quickly following Carol's method.
The first stage involves creating a quilt sandwich by layering paper and fabric together. I printed out some pics and text from the Internet and stitched them together to make my top.
As you can see the stitching was done before adding any colour.
Now I have to confess that when I first came across this method in an issue of Quilting Arts magazine I thought the "Cracked" referred to the texture of the paper once completed. In fact it refers to the fact that a literal crack can be added by cutting into the quilt and stitching a ladder to rejoin the pieces.

From a design perspective I wasn't sure how this would add to my already little thought out layout but then decided that the cracks symbolize the trenches of World War1 which ran all over the countryside of Northern France!
The fun part was in adding the colour. I used Brusho, added to acrylic gel medium (the essential ingredient). This gave a translucent, watercolour effect.
I then added appliques of poppy flowers and seed heads using the same method, but using tissue paper instead of printing paper.
As you can see the Brusho gives a lovely brightness.
Finally I added stems by couching down some hemp cord and machine stitched in some grasses.
There is a lot more info on this method if you follow the Cracked Paper Quilts link.