Fabric Collage Finish Line No. 73

Thanks to all who have recently submitted Finish Line quilts, such as Alice Magorian whose heron appears above. If you too have a finished fabric collage you’d like to share, please use the link below.

Submit Quilt for "Finish Line"

I appreciate all who send in their collage quilts to share with other readers—hundreds of quilts within 73 Finish Line posts so far! Sharing your art is in a very real way revealing something of yourself, potentially making yourself vulnerable. However, through the comments from readers, it’s quite evident how appreciated every submission and every individual’s collage journey is to read about. All art is good art, I’ve long believed.

Together, you have made a wonderfully supportive community of collage artists and unfailing supporters of each other. It warms my heart to be able to create the outlet for such positivity.

Let the ongoing celebration of fabric collage artwork continue with the following lineup of quilts and stories. Thank you.

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Kathy Anglea

Kathy Anglea of Carlsbad, CA, gives us a slice of California with her pelican on a pier. I love the fabrics Kathy chose to use, letting the prints suggest the motion and shapes of the feathers flowing down the back of Pelli, without needing to recreate every feather. I smiled as Kathy tells the tale of the perseverance it took to get the eye just right. Twelve tries. I get it, it can be the seemingly simple things that trip you up, and it’s dedication to get it right that gets you through.

No work you put into your fabric collage is ever wasted work. If it doesn’t come out the way you envision and you have to try again,  you’re learning, working toward when it all does come together as it has for Kathy with Pelli.

From Kathy:

I took your 5 day Asilomar class in 2018. (Seems so long ago.) Also relied on your posts and Serendipity Quilts book as time went by. It’s a California brown pelican at the Oceanside pier. Pelicans like to hang around the fisherman and sometimes the fisherman toss scraps from their catch. We watched them catch the fish and preen on the railing. I used 3 of my photos to create the image.

I hadn’t realized Pelli had to be so big initially. Hearing that we needed to blow up the image by 450% to get the beak and neck right [large enough to work on], I almost switched photos. It was hard to do the eye; 12 attempts to get one small enough. The ginkgo fabric just worked as more feathers.

I wanted Pelli only to be collaged, so hand-painted the sky fabric and used an ombré for the wood. The water is a McKenna Ryan piece with Angelina fibers and silk fusion for waves. The shore has cheesecloth and more Angelina fibers. I free motion quilted everything.

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Alice Magorian

Alice Magorian of Baltimore, MD, took my Portland Maine Quilt Retreat in October 2018, where she started this piece. Many who choose birds as subjects, especially the long necked and long legged varieties of birds, don’t realize how large it will need to be to have a decent amount of width to work the collage within.

Consider the eye or the beak or even the neck and imagine trying to work on them. How big should the drawing be enlarged to more easily create those features? Now take that percentage of enlargement and apply it to the overall height, and suddenly the bird is taller than you are! But Alice accepted the challenge and now has an impressive specimen to show for it.

From Alice:

This quilt was started in a 5 day workshop with Susan, up in Portland, Maine. I attended with a group of friends and some of us already had your book. We practiced the technique by doing a spiral before we went, so we’d have a better idea of what to expect and what to bring.

I had a hard time deciding on a subject for this quilt. I knew I wanted to do an animal, and I like to photograph wildlife, but didn’t have a lot of pictures with the subject up close and central. The pictures that I liked online were all under copyright. I finally discovered the gray heron picture I’d taken a few years before at a local wildlife refuge and decided to go with that. There have been plusses and minuses with that choice. I really love the subject, and the Gray Heron is kind of iconic here in the Chesapeake Bay area. I’m really happy with the way it came out. But if I had to make the choice about what to draw for a first collage quilt again, I would go with something more compact. This collage came out very large due to the elongated nature of the subject, and it took me a couple of years to finish it.

I love fabric collage, and I had done appliquéd collages before taking this workshop with Susan. I was used to working with larger pieces and letting the patterns in the fabric provide texture and detail. Susan’s method creates a more sophisticated and complex image. I learned a lot in the workshop and had a great time, and would love to do it again.

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Lizzie Stebbins

Lizzie Stebbins is from Jefferson, Maine and Key Largo, Florida, which she says is the best of both worlds. She has attended one of my Maine retreats, has commented on quite a few blog posts, submitted a previous Finish Line quilts here and here, and has now sent in two more collages, both of which share Lizzie’s sunny, flamboyant style, and personality. Check out the variety of fabrics, colors, and prints she uses to create Miss Billie’s curly fur above—that’s one happy pup.

From Lizzie:

I first saw Susan’s quilts at the Maine Quilts show and fell in love. I began with a spiral, then a turtle and then the dragonfly mandala from her book, Serendipity Quilts. I was able to get on the waitlist for the 2019 Harpswell, Maine class and lucky enough to get in! I read Susan’s blog religiously and get a lot from it.

My friend, Gloria Avner, took a picture of my dog Billie while we were out on my little boat here in Maine. I loved the photo so much, I sent it to the local newspaper and they published it. Of course it had to become a collage quilt! As with all of my collages so far, they go through some terribly ugly stages before finding themselves. I used pink and purple because Billie is such a princess, black tulle for shadowing and some fun sparkling tulle for the boat wake behind her.

What a great use of a tie-dye fabric—as a halo around the face of a beloved friend. And Lizzie’s use of novelty fabrics helps tell the story of that friend—the conch shell, the gambling motif, the garden flowers, the lips and cigarette—they all work to give us insight into who “Maryann” was. Such a happy tribute.

From Lizzie:

My friend, Maryann, died in March 2020. She was a well known and much loved character in our Key Largo community. An original hippie who wore tie dye, loved her dog, her cat, her garden, the occasional cigarette (and some whacky tobaccky) and trips to the casino when she had a few bucks, she blew down the sun every night with her trusty conch shell.

As usual, my collage went through some very messy-scary iterations. In the end, I was able to incorporate fabric denoting her various idiosyncrasies, used black tulle for shadowing, then used some blue sparkly tulle here and there, some silver curlycues in her hair, covered the whole piece in black tulle and put tulle star fabric in the heavens, where she surely is now.