A TECHNIQUE DRIVEN Blog dedicated to mastery of surface design techniques. First we dye, overdye, paint, stitch, resist, tie, fold, silk screen, stamp, thermofax, batik, bejewel, stretch, shrink, sprinkle, Smooch, fuse, slice, dice, AND then we set it on fire using a variety of heat tools.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Why hand stitched?

During the last 11 years I have been hand quilting, machine quilting - but for years my quilting remained just a secondary structure to the pieced top. I chosed hand quilting when i wanted to bring a kind of softness into the composition like in my Cityscapes #5.
Cityscapes #5, detail
Also in my big-sized Color Composition #1, 2 and 4 I've chosen hand quilting, which was still a secondary structure to the composition. 


Color Compositions #4 - detail
But slowly I got really attached to hand quilting and realized that for me it was more a personal mark-making process, unique and special. Like comparing commercial fabrics and hand dyed fabrics. So I asked myself, if quilting is a kind of mark-making and not just an utilitarian connection in between the three layers of the quilt, than it doesn't need to be a secondary structure.
Of course, I wasn't discovering something earth shatteringly new, just think of the trapunto quilts, but it made me look around and explore stitching as a mark-making, and especially the mark-making techniques in the arts. This exploration coincided with Dorothy Caldwell's workshop on Human Marks and I came to the conclusion that I can enrich my quilts by using stitching instead of quilting (here I mean quilting in a traditional sense). 
This process of exploration resulted in my Human Marks series, which I wrote up in my blog and which I won't repeat here. 
I wasn't only looking for visual inspirations but practical advices as well, like how to make my marks. I will discuss these inspirations next time.

5 comments:

  1. Impressive! Beautiful hand stitching!

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  2. I had no idea this was hand stitched! The stitches are so uniform. I love the idea of "marks".

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  3. Please, it would be nice for the readers to know who is writing the post. Is that possible? When a post is written in first person unless it is signed we have no idea who is writing.

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  4. Janice, at the end is written who posted the piece - if not otherwise indicated she's the author.
    In this case: my name is Beata Keller-Kerchner.

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  5. I'm looking forward to this month's series of posts! Good start

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