Cone flower Quilt & ATC's

Homage to John

My cone flower quilt was designed from a journaling exercise that Julie Balzer did in her Journal Quilt class at City Quilter in Manhattan. Each person was handed a small image and from that had to do a series of quick sketches that the image invoked. From the 8 or 9  sketches done, one image is chosen to blow up and make into an 8 1/2" x 11" quilt. I chose the cone flower because it reminded me of the beautiful house I had in Vermont with my late husband John and the perennial gardens I tended lovingly. It is an homage to my husband.

The quilt is painted with Lumiere fabric paints, machine and hand quilted and in the process of being hand beaded. I spent three glorious hours in the park yesterday sitting at one of the chess tables hand beading.

These are two of 9 ATC's I made for a recent trade I did with a group of women in the Journal Quilt class I just finished taking with Julie Balzer at City Quilter.  The only criteria was that they had to be quilt like in some way. So I took patterned paper I had previously painted with acrylic paints, layered that with cotton batting and backed it all with lightweight canvas. I stitched each ATC with a cross stitch in each corner to hold the layers together then sewed on a found object gleaned from the streets of Manhattan in the week prior to making the ATC's.