More Fabric Collage Finish Line Quilts: Online Submissions 6

Fabric collage quilts from around the world! Sometimes husband and partner Tom shows me the statistics that display where in the world people are when they visit the website. The graphic below shows all the countries visitors hailed from in the last year. (Remember, it could be as few as one visit! Still…)

Looks like I have some work to do in Africa and Central Asia, but otherwise the world seems to be catching on to the wonders of fabric collage! 😉

More impressive to me personally than these stats are the pictures of quilts I receive in my inbox each week. The quilt above by Eileen Doherty as well as the others below are good examples. Submissions this week come from both coasts and middle of the U.S., Canada, Australia, and in what I believe is a Finish Line first, Slovakia! Quilters around the world are learning fabric collage from my in-person classes, from my book, from the blog, and from the Fabric Collage Master Class. There’s no wrong way to learn.

Enjoy these Finish Line quilts wherever in the world you are.

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Submit Your Sea Turtle!

The Susan Carlson Fabric Collage: Sea Turtle eWorkshop (sample above) will be available by mid-March. In anticipation of this launch, I plan to feature a Finish Line post of sea turtle quilts on Saturday, March 7. I have a few already, but if you have a sea turtle quilt you would like to share, please use the link below to submit it by Monday, March 2. It can be any sea turtle, whether based on my pattern or not. Thanks!

Submit Quilt for "Finish Line"

Like the Fabric Collage Master Class, the Sea Turtle eWorkshop will be an online learning resource with text, photos, and videos. In this workshop, the videos are even more extensive, with over three hours of step-by-step instruction for creating the project.

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Nancy Adair

Nancy Adair, from Thompson Falls, Montana, took my class in Kalispell, Montana at the Quilt Gallery in June of 2019. This quilt was started there, her first class with me. Her Chinese dragon seems to float in the night sky over a cityscape.

Take special note of some of the fabric prints Nancy used for her dragon. I especially love his wild headdress and the jellyfish tentacles that became part of it. Brilliant. Be sure to check out those claws too. Click on any photos in the post to see them larger.

From Nancy:

I came across a picture of a dragon tattoo on a free tattoo website and it really caught my eye. I’ve always been partial to dragons, perhaps since I was born in the year of the dragon, so I chose this guy for my project. I did a little checking on the internet and found the Japanese numbers “1952” (my birth year) to place at the top of my quilt.

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Karin Tracy

This quilt is the third that Karin Tracy has completed since her class with me in my October 2018 Maine Quilt Retreat. Karin travelled all the way from Vancouver, BC to attend the workshop. Be sure to check out the finished result, a larger-than-life portrait, “My Granddaughter, Alia,” in this Finish Line post.

For this quilt Karin upped the challenge by using her Photoshop skills to incorporate four different elements into her composition. She describes her approach to the design below, considering and imagining details down to the shadows the cats would’ve cast if they were truly sitting on that couch at that moment. Very impressive and what a great result—design-wise and collage-wise—you can almost see their tails twitching at the birds.

From Karin:

I love to watch the birds in my yard and my 3 cats will sometimes watch as well, although never at the same time. This quilt is not based on any actual photo but my effort to put an idea I had in my head onto fabric. I searched for a window picture from a free source on the internet to get a basic idea for making a window. The view out my window is not like in the picture—although I wish it was. I then used photoshop to place my hummingbird feeder and birds onto that hoping I was getting the scale okay. I took a picture of the couch and used photoshop to add it in as well.

 

Then I photographed the backs of each of my cats and placed them onto the couch at the window. I enjoyed all aspects of the process although trying to make a pattern out of an image in my head is extremely tedious. I had to guess how I thought light would create shadows under the cats on the couch. I put a glittery material over the windows to mimic how light might hit the glass. It was fun to put an image from my head onto a quilt, but I think I’d rather stick to an actual photo next time!

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Barbara Reed

Barbara Reed is a member of Block Party Quilters in Sammamish, WA, where I taught a two-day Fish, Bugs, and Butterflies class this past September.  I remember how happy Barbara was to have gotten in the class at literally the last minute (well, hours) and then to jump in with both feet.

She lives in nearby Renton, WA, which as she explains has a sister city in Japan. I did a double-take as Tom scrolled through the online submissions for this post—the photo below is not a typical looking submission for a fabric collage quilt. It certainly adds to the international focus of this post and makes me smile seeing Barbara’s quilt being honored and applauded before traveling to its new home in Japan.

From Barbara:

Lucky enough to join a class with Susan the day before the class. A challenge to myself to do something I never thought I could do. What fun I had. Then I was asked to make a quilt to give to Renton’s sister city as a 50 year association gift, three weeks before they were due to arrive. The quilt was received very well.

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Marilyn Knepp

This quilt was made almost ten years ago, long before we began this blog, by Marilyn Knepp when she attended a class at Quilting Adventures in New Braunfels, Texas. I still remember being very impressed with Marilyn’s focus and how far she got along in the collage piecing process. And when you read what she has to say below, she’s right, the finished photo of this lovely quilt arrived awhile ago, and was safely stowed away in Photos. Thank you Marilyn, for persevering and re-submitting. It’s a pleasure to finally share your work!

From Marilyn:

I learned a lot from you and surprised myself with what I made with your tutelage. I sent this photo to you some years ago but I don’t think you have ever included it in a Finish Line post. I finished the top during the week of the class, and quilted it immediately when I got home.

The fish were a small element in a larger design in a [copyright-free] Dover Art Nouveau publication. I had a vague notion of color–thinking silver and gold. Your directed questioning led me to the lavender and yellow at the outer edge of the fish, each color deepening through the body. I had flown from Michigan to Texas for the class and brought considerable fabric with me. As happens though, I had almost no turquoise and teal which I ended up wanting for the surrounding ocean. My classmates all were generous with what they had brought, and also generous with excellent comments that led me to a few revisions. I had only a smallish bit of the Liberty print fabric that I used for the border which required me to carefully determine how to parse it to get all 4 sides bordered. I used every centimeter. I used a dark tulle over the composition and quilted with silk and with metallic threads.

A successful dive into the photo archives turned up this photo of Marilyn with her in-progress quilt at the class in New Braunfels. Look at the pins in place for quilting, while still in class—an occurrence as rare as a Leap Year!

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Maria Janotkova

Maria Janotkova is from Slovakia in central Europe. I believe hers is the first Slovakian quilt to appear in the Finish Line. Congratulations! Maria has a good eye for finding and cutting around prints in her fabrics to represent the feathers and fluff of this opulent fellow. She lets the patterns in these Kaffe Fasset fabrics do much of the work for her. My favorite part is how Maria picked out a single radial design that could give form to the entire head—beak to neck—of the turkey. One piece of fabric. Perfect.

From Maria,

I am happy owner of ebook Serendipity Quilts, which I have bought to learn this pictorial technique. I was fascinated by a few videos from process and was searching for Susan book.

 

My quilt is whole made from Kaffe Fasset fabrics. The cabbage design inspired me to create turkey. I have enjoyed merge of different floral patterns to get this picture.

 

This quilt is one of my hen series.

Another in her hen series, a quilt of a guinea hen, is available to view at her instagram page.

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Kerry Graf

Kerry Graf from Canberra, Australia started with the Fabric Collage Master Class, putting a spin on the beginning exercise of a spiral design. From there she continued adapting the collage process to what worked for her. No worries. Kerry did a lovely job working with values—the lights and darks—in a variety of printed fabrics, effectively portraying the draping weight of this interestingly patterned guy (or gal).

From Kerry:

Lesson 1 of the Fabric Collage Master Class suggested a spiral to practice creating collage and to use a range of tonal values. Not wanting a practice exercise and liking complexity, I used an image by Tirza van Dijk to create an art quilt.

The lesson suggested building the collage on cotton fabric, and although I started doing this, I moved to using an adhesive stabilizer instead, for ease of moving the components. The snake was cross-hatched to give an impression of scales and to hold the collage pieces. After assembly, the snake itself was overstuffed with batting to increase the 3D effect.

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Carol Beckhaus

Traveling to the other side of Australia, Carol Beckhaus from Sydney, learned fabric collage from my book Serendipity Quilts. Carol’s thoughts on wanting to learn fabric collage but not being able to get into my classes, is why we, Tom and I, put the work into getting the fabric collage word out through the internet by various means—website, blog, Master Class Manual, and soon, our first eWorkshop. I love sharing what I do, and through these submissions, what so many others are doing.

Carol mentions not having the right stash, but I think her whale looks great. She’s moved from the warm colors of golden oranges to cool blues and the accent of reds in the face and head—and it’s all very fresh and impressionistic. No problem there. I look forward to seeing her next fabric collage.

From Carol:

I made this my first collaged quilt out of Susan’s book Serendipity Quilts. I loved the process and I am now working on my next one. I follow Susan on her blog posts and I am currently thinking next year to buy the Master Class. I would love to do a class with Susan but unfortunately when she does come to Australia the classes are all booked out. Susan’s blog has helped me tremendously especially the blog on eyes.

 

Having not done much collage, I felt I did not have the right stash but made do, so colours are a bit haphazard. I added black tulle over the whole piece and free-hand machine quilted. The piece is faced.

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Eileen Doherty

And now to end this post back to New England in the U.S.. Eileen Doherty drove up to my April 2018 Maine Quilt Retreat from her home in Westfield, Massachusetts. She brought along the beginnings of the quilt above, which she had started on her own. Eileen’s attention to detail is amazing in this first collage quilt of hers. She worked and reworked this momma and baby into perfection—I liked how she left some of the fabric prints as larger shapes, while reducing others, making a visual transition from the more heavily textured (hairier) parts of the bodies to the smoother areas. The faces are certainly mesmerizing, but there’s something about the aqua blue touches that add extra interest, depth, and spark to this pair.

From Eileen:

I first saw Susan’s work online in August of 2017 and was totally intrigued, even though I had only made two simple baby quilts. I was lucky enough to get a place in her class for April of 2018 so I began the quilt in February, using her book and her blog posts as my sources to get going.

I loved the April class and so when I got an email in August that there was an opening for an Advanced class in October of 2018, I immediately signed up. By the end of that week, my gorillas were well on their way.

When I got home, I signed up for both a quilting class so I could learn to do free motion quilting and an art class to have another artist’s eye for some support. Both were very helpful in my process of completing the quilt.

 

This quilt was based on a photo I took at the Bronx Zoo of a nervous baby gorilla coming to its mother for comfort, and I feel as though I captured that moment, particularly in the serene face of the mother. She truly spoke to me during the whole process, insisting on the purple color and lots of flowers, and she kept me calm whenever the work became frustrating.

I also learned a lot about patience in the process of creating this quilt. When I got to the first class in April, I had worked on much of the mother gorilla, but after the first meeting with Susan, I realized that the pieces I had cut were too small so, despite having worked on the quilt for two months, I took apart everything but the mother’s right foot. That was my first of many lessons in patience in the year and a half that I worked on the quilt! When anyone asks how many hours I spent on creating it, I avoid doing that calculation because the process itself was so involving and at times, almost meditative.

It is also because of the mother’s serenity that I have decided on what I will do with this quilt. I have contacted the Baystate Children’s Hospital in Springfield, MA to donate it to them, with the hope that nervous little ones will also find comfort in the calm presence of the mother. I will be meeting with the staff later this month to arrange the details of the donation.