February JQC - Red Moon Rising

My piece this month sort of created itself. I knew I wanted to start with transferring the picture of the Geisha to fabric, but from there, it just sort of grew on its own. I bought a couple of collections of hand-dyed silk and silk velvet scraps on eBay, and number of those pieces wound up forming the log cabin frame for the Geisha herself. I backed the silks with a stabilizer to give them more substance. I took the transferred picture with me to Quiltz when I went looking for some oriental fabrics to use in this piece, and was lucky to find several fabrics that I thought worked perfectly - I liked those fabrics so much, I wound up wishing this piece was larger so I could have used more of them - but I'm sure I'll find a use for them again. I'm having a hard time remembering how to download this picture into webshots, but hopefully by tomorrow, which is really my reveal date, Deb will have read about my problem and walked me through it, once again. The journal page which I attached to the back of this piece reads as follows:

Journal Quilt Challenge 2006

February


Guide me on my way –
My boat rows on across a sea
Of trackless waves,
And I cannot tell where I am bound –
O wind that blows up on all sides

Princess Shokushi


2/13/06 A friend gave me a box with a print of this Geisha on top of it. I transferred the Geisha print to silk fabric, then did a log cabin setting around it using scraps of silk and velvet that I bought on eBay. The background just seemed to form itself as I found Oriental fabrics that complemented the colors in the Geisha print. For a long time I had the transfer of the Geisha and some fabrics that I selected to go with it – and perhaps a general idea of what I might do. Last night I dreamed about constructing the log cabin frame around the Geisha and the remainder of the quilt just seemed to flow from there –construction, except for printing the Geisha on fabric, and quilting completely done in a single day!

Pat Havens
SWquilter
Phoenix, Arizona