Small Art Quilts in New Designs

I find a lot of inspiration from looking at paintings and more recently at stained glass designs.  Recently I saw a circle of stained glass that was comprised of 6-8 layers of curved colors.  I love working with curvy cuts in my designs so I gave this one a try in fabric, of course.  I’ve been focused on creating smaller quilts for an upcoming local Holiday arts and crafts show I’m doing December 3rd in Lewisburg, PA and this was a design I managed to create in an 11″ square quilt….my smallest yet!  It resembles a sunset but also sort of a rainbow.  It is shown first in this blog.

Now my creative energies were activated so I made three more quilts in this type of design.  All of them have dramatic curves and vibrant colors using some of my print and batik fabrics.  With all four small quilts I did a variety of free motion quilting for each color layer, making them playful and a bit wonky.  If I was a pattern kind of person, I’d make a pattern and duplicate some of these BUT…..I just have no desire to do that so each one is new and different and takes a bit of planning and design work.  Though these four small quilts have only about 7-12 seams, the more intensive free motion quilting throughout the quilts meant that the time to create, quilt and finish each one ended up being about 3-4 hours.  Small quilts are not necessarily quicker to make!  But these were fun and a bit less involved than many of my other designs that involved many more and smaller pieces.