Passages Through a Red Landscape

This piece began with no direction except that I wanted to make a red quilt, and I had a lovely time buying and dyeing and painting red fabrics and red threads for it, not to mention painting metal shim red-purple with Pinata inks and making red textured circles out of Model Magic.

I made the embellished inserts separately while finishing off some other project on the sewing machine. If you're interested in more details, check out the article "Hyperembellishment" in Quilting Arts' Winter 2005 issue.

Then I pieced a bunch of squares on a red felt backing, inserted an embellished element into each one and considered what to do next. The eight squares here wanted to be landscapes, and I filled the center with machine lace.

Six other squares wanted to be doors, and they've been sewn together and will probably turn up as a finished piece in a couple of years, after they tell me what they want next. Whatever it is, I hope it involves a lot of embellishment, because there are still way too many red threads in the embroidery drawer!

Center

Center square

Random Detail

Detail of hyper-embellished insert