In The Pink… Just in Time: Ravenswood PinkWalk

I was recently invited to exhibit a new piece of artwork for the first annual Ravenswood PinkWalk, sponsored by House Beautiful Magazine, to celebrate their March issue, The Power of Pink.  All of the artwork will be exhibited on Sunday, February 27th in the Ravenswood Art District, and four of the exhibiting artists will be featured in the magazine.  I figured it was a good opportunity to continue to HONE my skills through the pursuit of creativity anywhere it comes.

The only thing that posed a problem for me was coming up with a new piece of artwork with less than two weeks to go, and getting it to downtown Chicago by Friday. Oh, and I’m in the middle of hosting two quilt alongs with new blocks every week, 5 customer projects, and 30 quilts in my long arm backlog.  Other than that… no problemo!

I knew that I wanted my art to be framed, and I knew that this would be another great opportunity to work with Noriko Endo’s technique of shredding fabric.  I came up with a really abstract concept, in various shades of pink to go with the theme, and then just let loose.  I didn’t get very many in progress pictures, but here it is all layered and pinned ready to be quilted:

Here’s the back of it so you can see the quilting.  The quilting is very dense, done in a pink rayon thread. I had to stitch very tightly because I knew I’d be cutting into it and I didn’t want the stitches to come loose.  This was also not the project to get worried over the tension.  It was free motion quilted on my regular home machine, and I didn’t take any measures to check or fix the tension. (See, even home machines have tensions issh!)

So at this point, I put it on the mounting board to see where I’ll be making my cuts:

The piece is way too rectangular, and my goal was to remedy that without cutting out my favorite parts:

This is really tricky, because you can absolutely ruin a piece by cutting in the wrong places.  I just kept cutting until most of the straight edges were gone, and then I took the piece back to the machine and sealed the edges with a funky, chunky variegated yarn. Then, I took an upholstery needle, some 30 wt thread, and literally stitched the piece directly to the mounting board.

Here’s the piece in the frame:

And here’s another shot out of the frame so the glass doesn’t reflect my dining room:

Here’s a detail shot:

And another:

So the photography isn’t the best, but I managed to finish it in time and get it over to UPS to be shipped before it would cost am arm and a leg for overnight air mail. 

I hope that people like it!  What do you think?