Alice & Don 70 x 70 2004 This quilt is now in the collection of my brother, Don McMahan, my sis-in-law, Leah Rempel and my neices Charlotte and Emily.

 

In late 1967 I began making pictures with cloth, i.e., experimenting with drawings translated into fabric.  Then I thought of the silk screen prints of Andy Warhol--the repeated portraits of various movie stars--I thought that doing portraits using pictures of family and friends repeated many times was a good idea for my quilts. 

“Alice and Don (2004) is one of the updated versions of some of the quilted portraits that I was doing in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I wanted to share the technique with others, so I made some new quilts as well as writing instructions to take my students through the process, step by step. “Alice and Don” is a wonderful portrait quilt that starts with very simple drawings of two faces (like kindergarten!) on 8 inch squares of paper.  Each of these is repeated 8 times (making a total of 16 squares) There are 16 different fabrics; one for each face.  The pieces are cut out and rearranged; similar to putting a jig-saw puzzle together 16 times. Fusible interfacing is used to anchor the pieces.   Then the satin stitch is used for the appliqué.

Alice and Don were my parents.  This quilt expresses my gratitude to them for giving me life and my forgiveness of them for giving me problems to work through!  In their portraits I used fabrics that reminded me of happy children.  In the 16 square Calla Lily border I used Hawaiian fabrics, reminding me of relaxing warm love.  I calculated the size of the quilt at 70 x 70 inches, reminding me of Jesus teaching us to forgive “seventy times seven”

Whatever it is you feel you want to do in art quilts--simply begin, and let it lead you to the next step.  You can do what ever you want to do, exploring drawing, color and form, with your sewing machine, fabric, thread, scissors, time and an idea. Tap into your creativity and playfulness!  Be Creageous!