
Becoming a Quilt Artist Session 1: Introduction
Heather ThomasDescription
Meet your instructor, Heather Thomas and hear about the journey you have the opportunity to join her on as you find out what it takes to traverse the chasm between craftsperson and artist. Get a feel for the depth and breadth of the skills you will want to add to your tool box so that you can become the master of your own creative will. See how Heather uses the elements of color and the principles of design along with a bevy of integral techniques as she introduces you to the idea of bringing something new into the world; your art-work!
We all start somewhere, whatever it is that we're doing, whatever our hobby is, whatever it is our careers, our journey, we all start somewhere. And this is my starting point. I started quilting, will be 30 years ago this year. And I was kind of lucky I had a grandmother who quilted when I said I wanted to make a quilt, she said that she had some patterns in her spare bedroom in the bottom drawer of the Bureau. And when I went in there to look for those patterns what I found were some blocks.
There were no written instructions, there were just these blocks. And so I took the blocks back to her and said all I could find were these blocks, I didn't see any patterns. She goes, silly girl, those are the patterns. And I said, well, how do I know what to do? And she said, go get you a ruler and measure each of those units and add your seam allowance, cut yourself some templates and sew them back together again.
And I was like, wow okay. So I learned from the very beginning of my quilt making experience, how to make a block from the nuts and bolts up. Nobody gave me a pattern said, cut this this size and sew this to that and sew that to the other. And all of the blocks in this wonderful kind of very naive looking quilt, were from that stack of blocks. And so I learned how to do half square triangles from the very beginning and how to do bias triangles and flying geese and all sorts of wonderful things from the very get go.
I remember how excited I was when I found all of these matching fabrics. They're all this itty bitty tiny check, you can't really see very well anymore but this tiny itty bitty check and I got every single one that he had in every single color that they had and use nothing but them together and I thought it was so clever. And then I hand quilted it because I believe that every quilt for it to be a true quilt had to be hand quilted but I moved it up a notch because I hand quilted in color and the colored quilting threads had only been out for a little while when I did that. My daughter used this as her baby quilt for many years and continue to use it as her quilt for watching TV with and stuff. And I believe she was doing some painting in her house and got some artists paint on it too and did that.
But it's still a cherished piece, when she decided that it needed to be taken better care of, she handed it back and said, why don't you keep this for me. And so I now have it again but this is where I started and this is where I've gone. So this is my most recent quilt. And yes, this is a quilt. A lot of people look it and don't think that it's a quilt, I'm not sure what they think it is.
But because I mount my work now and you can see that this is mounted on stretcher bars and a wood base ready to hang. They present themselves as something far more than quilt. This piece actually started out as a white piece of fabric. And I did all of the quilting stitching and everything first and did the paint painting afterwards. Adding painting to my work has just changed it so drastically.
The black heavy outline here is twisted bits of fabric that are stitched on during the quilting process. And then there's all this wonderful texture that is given to the piece by the stitch line and painters will come up to the piece and go, how did you get that texture in there? And I'll say, well it's a quilt and it's a painting. I call it a stitched painting and they're just flabbergasted. But I'm a quilt artist, that's what I do, I make art that have quilt as their basis, fabric and stitch as their basis.
And I've gone from here, to here and cross that chasm in between. And I'm in a pretty happy place. And I'm making original work, work that other people aren't making. And I find that very exciting. I think that with a little bit of help along the way and a couple of little pushes and nudges and some assurance that you can do it too, that you'll be surprised at where your quilting art can take you.
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