Grayson Studios Blog

Back in the Swing of Things

I’ve been back in the studio for a week now following a little holiday relaxation. It was nice to take a small break but I was ready to get back. I needed to download all of the images I had been storing in my brain during the holiday (okay, I know, cheesy metaphor but work with me). Anyway, here are some reference shots of a quilt (forgive the straight pins) I recently finished for the Highlands Museum and Discovery Center in Ashland, Kentucky. The quilt was made to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The quilt features Abraham Lincoln (of course), President Barack Obama who regularly discussed Lincoln’s influence on his work, and Elizabeth Keckley an enslaved woman who served the Lincolns (especially Mary Todd Lincoln) for a good deal of her adult life. Keckley was a phenomenal sewist (sewer, seamstress, take your pick). She is well known for the dresses she created for Mary Todd Lincoln and others. Keckley was also a QUILTER.

I had fun working on this quilt. I used scraps of adire cloth, mud cloth, hand pieced log cabins made from vintage fabric (the quilt HAD to have log cabin blocks), and found photos from ebay. The picture of President Obama is from a piece of Ghanian fabric I received after the election. You will also notice that I played around with motifs from the confederate flag in some of my blocks. The figure at the bottom of the quilt are the ancestors preparing for flight home.  In addition to hand and machine piecing I used phototransfer and printmaking techniques (lithography). The title of the quilt is The Constitution and Union Forever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Art Quilts, UrbanWildFlowerDolls. The entry is tagged under Accomplishments and Goals, acrylic paint, Art Quilts, hand dyed fabric, traditional quilt blocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.