Fading Memories

Posted on May 16, 2011 by jean cheszek

I made Fading Memories last year as a donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative, which is a non-profit group raising money for Alzheimer’s research (over $520,000 so far!).

My parents both suffered from Alzheimer’s. This quilt portrays them as young adults when they each served in the Navy in World War II. The fabric in the quilt is made from photos taken over the course of their lives — representing all the memories that faded as the Alzheimer’s progressed. Using family photos, I created a montage, and then printed the montage in five different values (light to dark) on fabric. With this fabric, I created the ‘cut out’ portraits of my parents from their Navy portraits.

The back of the quilt shows the photo montage along with a more recent photo of my parents.

Fading Memories – back

This quilt is my post for the Spring 2011 Blogger’s Quilt Festival.

My Quilt is Going to AQS – Paducah

Posted on March 11, 2011 by jean cheszek

One of my latest quilts, Oil and Water Don’t Mix, was juried into the AQS quilt show in Paducah (April 27 – 30). Here’s a full view of the quilt.

I started working on this quilt last summer, after the oil company that I used to work for caused the largest oil spill in US history. This quilt is my attempt to highlight some of the animals impacted by this oil spill (brown pelicans, loggerhead turtles, dolphins, shrimp, blue crabs, coral, and migratory songbirds like the oriole). Here’s a good article from the National Wildlife Federation on the impact of the oil spill on animals.

I designed the piecing of the quilt in a vector graphics program (Corel Draw) and then sewed it together using blue gradations of my hand-dyed cottons for the water and rust-dyed cotton/silk for the oil. Here’s a picture after it’s all been pieced. At about this point, I decided that I wanted to enter this into the Paducah AQS contest. However, when I looked up the rules, I found that the quilt would need to be at least 40 inches wide and 40 inches high, and this quilt top was only 36 inches square–I was in a bit of a panic. It was a lot of work to piece the top and I certainly didn’t want to start all over. I took a photo of the top and started playing with options in Photoshop. Below are some of the options — a black border (too stark), a dark blue border (better, but not great, and I wasn’t sure if I could get the right color blue), and a border of the rust fabric (OK, but still not great).

I finally decided that it would be best to extend the original piecing design to enlarge the quilt. So, I went back to Corel Draw and added in a 1 inch border for the dark blue, and then I extended most of the original design elements into the enlarged border area. It would have been impossible (and too obvious) to try to match everything without the added blue border around the original design. Here’s the pieced top with the new border, and before the quilting.

To finish the quilt, I added tons of thread painting–partly to disguise the imperfections of the new border.

Sunset Over Wisconsin Quilt

Posted on February 8, 2011 by jean cheszek

This weekend I wanted to try to make a more improvisational quilt than I’ve been doing lately. I thought I’d try to use up a lot of the smaller pieces of fabric I had leftover from previous projects.

In particular, I wanted to use of some of the leftovers from A Walk with Sparky, shown here on my design wall.

I started cutting these up and sewing them together with some hand-dyed fabric scraps, just matching colors I liked. I started arranging them into longer strips on my design wall, but I still wasn’t sure what to do with them.

Still without a real plan, I cut some of the pieces and started sewing them into stips of similar colors, light values at one end, progressing to darker values. I was still envisioning this as a vertical arrangement.

When I finally turned the strips horizontally, I realized it looked like a sunset over the farm hills of Wisconsin. I kept the quilting very simple–just echoing some of the curves. Here’s the finished quilt.