Chants to Your Favorite Goddess

This is my quilt for the theme “Rhythm” . It is a whole cloth piece hand painted with Dyne a Flow, text written with permanent marker, machine quilted and a few hand stitches holding it together.

The names written around the heart are those of goddesses from different cultures who represent love, fidelity and marriage. I did throw in a ringer–the Chinese goddess of face cream, Hsi Shih. The image inside the heart is drawn from a photograph and is colored with Prismacolor pencils. The heart motif is a continuation from the first two quilts.

The full title of this piece is “Chants to Your Favorite Goddess…..a beating heart, the comfort of the circle, soft voices in the chant, the hum of a sewing machine.” All these things seem to invoke a sense of peace and calm to me.

Ok, truth time. My project for this challenge isn’t exactly a quilt, although it does contain layers and stitching.

Rhythm

When I started thinking about the theme for this challenge, what I saw in my mind were objects moving together in harmony. I played with this idea on paper and found myself tearing the paper and weaving it. I realized that the weave of fabric is rhythmic, in that one row of fibers (the warp) flows into other rows (the weft), and they are all bound together so that they can move freely. Reading that now, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to anyone else, but it made a lot of sense to me lol.

Anyway, I knew then that I’d want to do a piece that had weaving as its focus, so I painted some fabrics, papers and even a piece of stiff interfacing with chaotic marks and color combinations with the intent of weaving them into a rhythmic cohesion.

I wanted all the papers and fabrics to weave together as if they were all one piece, so I devised a way of cutting and weaving that allowed me to interweave all of the pieces. Then it was mounted on a masonite board that I had covered with another sheet of painted paper. More painting across the entire piece helped bring it all together.

Rhythm (detail)

Hope you enjoy.

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

Thread Painting has been started! Need to remember to relax those shoulders. My original idea was to play off the idea of those nasty words in english that are hard to spell like rhythm but I went a more organic route. Justine

Rhythm has been here many times I work here details of what works on this theme, and a detail of my new quilt

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!

A tiny bit of the quilt for the challenge topic “Rhythm.” Sorry for the flash glare and In the future I will refrain from so many personal details.

It all happened so fast! One idea came and I mentally worked it up and really enjoyed it, then discarded it. The next idea was compatible with my new found attitude towards my marital problem and I found a little peace in working on it. And now it is finished.

And the word for the third challenge is:

RHYTHM

–noun
1.  movement or procedure with uniform or patterned recurrence of a beat, accent, or the like.
2.  Music:

• a.the pattern of regular or irregular pulses caused in music by the occurrence of strong and weak melodic and harmonic beats.
• b.a particular form of this: duple rhythm; triple rhythm.

3. measured movement, as in dancing.
4. Art, Literature . a patterned repetition of a motif, formal element, etc., at regular or irregular intervals in the same or a modified form.
5. the effect produced in a play, film, novel, etc., by the combination or arrangement of formal elements, as length of scenes, speech and description, timing, or recurrent themes, to create movement, tension, and emotional value in the development of the plot.
6.Prosody:

• a.metrical or rhythmical form; meter.
• b.a particular kind of metrical form.
• c.metrical movement.

7. the pattern of recurrent strong and weak accents, vocalization and silence, and the distribution and combination of these elements in speech.
8. Physiology . the regular recurrence of an action or function, as of the beat of the heart, or the menstrual cycle.
9. procedure marked by the regular recurrence of particular elements, phases, etc.: the rhythm of the seasons.
10. regular recurrence of elements in a system of motion.

Remember:

While you work on your challenge quilt you’re free to blog about it on your own blog or talk about it in the forums. Post sneak peeks and give us some insight into your creative process. If you would like to be able to post to this blog just email me at sue@threecreativestudios.com to let me know.

Post a photo of your finished quilt along with a description in the forums or here on the official Quilt Challenge blog anytime during the reveal week of 6/24/10 – 6/30/10.

All the details on this challenge can be found here.  Questions? Just email Sue at sue@threecreativestudios.com

Have fun with this challenge!