About 2 weeks before our reveal deadline, I decided to change the direction of my Passage piece. This meant completely starting over. Well it’s about a month late but here it is. I painted the fabric, then quilted it. Then quilted it some more to add details and finally painted it a second time to give more depth to the piece. It’s approximately 19×24.  On vacation in Savannah , GA a few years ago, we visited an old cemetery. I know, an odd thing to do for most people, but I have always been drawn to the peaceful feeling I receive from visiting a cemetery. In a back corner there was a wall stacked with old tombstones. They were so weathered most of them were unreadable. My Passage reflects the passage from this life into another.  Further details can be read on my blog under the 2010 quilt challenge category.

Passage

closeup of Passage

I had this quilt finished very shortly after getting the new word way back in February.  When time came to post it, I got a virus on my computer which wiped out my Internet connection.  The tech that spent hours with me trying to repair my connection managed to erase my hard drive.  I now have a new computer with a new operating system that I’ve finally figured out how it works. 

When I learned that Passage could refer to a portion of a painting highlighting the brushwork, I decided to try and replicate a small part of my favorite painting … Van Gogh’s “Crows Over Cornfield.”  After cutting and stitching down what seemed like thousands of tiny pieces of fraying fabrics, I decided that I would NEVER attempt this technique again!  Despite that, it’s my favorite quilt!

Here’s how I linked the word passages with the images of the irises in various stages of bloom. To me, the blooming of my irises is the passing point between winter and summer, the passing of the seasons. The blooming also reminds me of the passage from bud to flower and reminds me of my daughter who is at the blooming stage. She’s not a child, yet not an adult either.

The irises are photos that I took of the irises in my garden.  I printed the images onto to cotton fabric using Bubble Jet Set, then enhanced them with trapunto and machine quilting.

This challenge”Passage” immediately made me think of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.  In my childhood, it’s a movie I watched every year  around Easter time.  The passage through the Red Sea
prefigured Baptism which is the doorway into the Christian church.  So, with that, you can see the process of my quilt here.  Thanks, Sue.

This challenge was special to me.  With every project I am trying new things and this time I made fabric paper from Creative Paper Quilts by Terri Stegmiller:)  I decided to to dedicate this project to my Mom Rita.  She was so generous to pass down her love of sewing and quilting with her family.  This quilt represents her childhood and young adulthood.  It contains fabric photos, buttons, fabrics and jewelry she has had over the years.  My favorite are the buttons on the left side, they were on her coats as a child.  The fabric paper is quilted with silk thread I added some glitter and rubberstamping to jazz things up.  The fabric paper is a pattern from the 1950′s.  Enjoy!  http://quiltcrazygaljennalouise.blogspot.com/

I made it but I didn’t do it. I mean I didn’t actually pass thru the portals.

Passage is script. Passage is an opening. Passage is a portion of time. Those are some of the nouns. It would be the verb that interests me; to make a passage. And I didn’t complete the action.
But nothing is wasted if I learn. The comfortable and known is quilting. The unknown is fibre art. I’m a chicken most of the time. Art needs a focus and a commitment. Multi-tasking doesn’t work.

I was given a peacock feather by an accomplished artist almost a year ago to the date at our quilt show. It has been in my sewing room since. I like it. I luv text and have several fabrics with scripting on them. I have a new book and fabric weaving is in it. I need a wallhanging for a spot on my wall. I found some cute peacock fabric. It could all come together. But not well; I had serious problems. Probably because I wasn’t being true to myself. So it’ll get oohs and ahs from family and friends, but in my heart of hearts, everytime I look at it, I’ll know… I didn’t have a successful passage.

I find all the entries to be very brave. Could right of passage be as simple as picking up a peacock feather, sweeping the threshold clean and stepping thru?

I went through several different ideas and finally decided to go with the passage I love to take – that of the ferry ride from BC mainland to Vancouver Island. Having lived in the States for so many years I think of it as my northwest passage even though it is southwest Canada.
I took this photo in January 2009 as the ferry approached the island.  I used PhotoShop Elements to simplify the photo before printing it onto my fabric.

My initial vision for this quilt was a photograph I took many years ago of a corridor at the San Juan Capistrano Mission. At the time, I was taking a photography class and I was on the lookout for shots that would show the merging lines effect. From that inspiration, a floating corridor and passage evolved. The border has small machine embroidery motifs with a variety of religious and secular symbols. I wanted to leave my final intention somewhat vague so the viewer could bring their own experience to the piece.

There are a couple of detail photos on my blog.

Justine

14" x 14", fabric beads, metallic trim and painted corrigated cardboard embellishments

"detail"

When I signed up for Quilt Challenge 2010, it seemed like such a simple thing- six quilts in twelve months. How hard could that be? And then the first prompt, Puzzle, was announced, and I froze solid. I never could find an idea I liked well enough to bring me to the sewing machine, so that reveal passed without me.

Not this time! The second prompt for the quilt challenge was “Passage”, a theme that’s close to my heart: passages are the only means we have of moving from one stage of our lives to another. Each of my own passages- and it feels as if there have been thousands- is precious to me.

So the theme gave me a lot of ideas, but none of them really gelled until I settled on the manner in which I wanted to depict a Passage. I chose my current passion, fabric dyeing, to express a passage from one place to another- in this case, from one color into another.

I set out to dye pieces of fabric for my quilt, using a gray-to-black gradation. I dyed the fabric pieces twice and could only achieve a beautiful dove gray. Nice, but not what I needed. I finally realized that the chemical fixer I was using was NOT soda ash, which is why the fibers couldn’t hold onto the dye.

Out of fabric and black dye, I turned instead to my favorite blue- teal- to help me overdye the gray already present in the fabric. That was a success, and I was finally ready to start construction of the quilt, which wound up only taking a couple of days.

This quilt wound up being a lot more meaningful than just an expression of a simple passage- it was also the way forward I needed to get back into a series I’d adored working on last year but which had been put aside for other, more pressing concerns. I’d always felt as if I had a lot more to say with my “Fringe” series, and the ideas I’d wanted to express had been left truncated when I’d stepped away from the series. Now it’s time to get back to them and allow them to flower and find the voice they’d been struggling towards less than 12 months ago.

- Judi

Here is my Passage challenge quilt – completed after discarding my first effort.

I’m happy with the way it turned out and the ‘passage’ references.

The ‘passage’ on the back says:

PASSAGE
From the awe, wonder and delight of seeing, as an eight year old, the passage of lights of the ‘Aurora Australis’ across the southern sky from my childhood home in The Mallee, Australia; to lying on the back lawn as a teenager watching the passage of clouds across the blue of the outback Australian sky and wondering what all 15 year olds wonder; to, after the passage of 45 years as young woman, wife, mother, daughter, friend and colleague arriving at this house – at last the serenity of ‘my home’. The house is viewed from a hill across the river flowing past the bottom of my garden on its long passage through three states to the sea.

It is on the river that we watch the passage of the year, the bright flowers of spring, the family duck swimming in the warm water of summer, the brilliant reds, yellows and bronze of the leaves in autumn and then the sparking whiteness of the frost and snow in winter. These passages, seasons and colours are what inspire much of the creativity in my quilt designs.

However in my serenity I know that under the garden and under the house, for we have seen the entrances to their passages, the ants work away feverishly at their seemingly, never ending tasks, beside the earth worms forming their passages through the soil of the garden enriching it with their goodness and near, also in the ground, a layer of fossils, some of which make an appearance in a recently read book, Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier – a story of a woman, Mary Anning, who reacts to everything by instinct and ‘leads with her eyes’. 

Thank you for this challenge and congratulations to the quilts already posted – they are all so creative!                 Cheers  Robyn