Art Quilt Challenge #1

Do you know the Art Quilt Challenge Group on Facebook? No? You should! It's a rather new group founded by Carol McDowell of quiltedfabricart.blogspot.com and is ment to challenge quilters to make a quilt to a given theme.

The deadline for a challenge is every other month. End of December (yes I know, but better late than never) called for a quilt with the theme "Banned Books".

I live in Austria and we don't have a lot of banned books nowadays but in our not too far away history books weren't only banned but burnt.

So for my quilt I decided to combine banned and burnt books. The stack starts at the top with some books banned in the US and goes down to books burnt by the Nazis. All the books are stacked on a bonfire which is alreday burning. The title of my quilt is

IT'S A SMALL STEP FROM BANNED TO BURNT

The quilt is really small (approx. 8 x 12 inches / 20 x 30 cm) and still it was a real challenge for me with lots of first times.

I started with perusing my bookshelves and decided to use the following books (from the bottom up):
a book by Erich Kästner, a German author, nowadays mostly loved for his children books
a book by Bertolt Brecht - all the books from this German author were burnt
"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury - burnt and today still banned in some places
a book by Kurt Tucholsky - all of his books were burnt
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain - a banned book I love
"To kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee - banned
"1984" by George Orwell - banned

The first thing to do was to take a photo.

I loaded the photo onto my computer and by using Photoshop I created a new background for the books - a dark blue with some texture to resemble fabric. Then I "painted" some logs under the books which looked rather abstract at that time.

I printed the final picture onto fabric. A first one for me. It took some fabric sheets before I realized that I have to print it upside down so that I don't loose the logs at the bottom of the picture to the margins of my printer.

With basting spray I glued top, batting and backing together. This was also a first one as I usually don't use this spray. But I was afraid of getting holes in the print when basting or pin-basting.

I quilted around each book with invisible thred. Another first one. I never used this thread before. So I read about it on the Internet - everyone telling me that this might produce some problems with tension and with needles and with broken thread and so on. So I quit reading and just started to quilt - usual needle, usual tension - no problems at all.

Then I quilted the logs and quilted some bark texture into them.

Afterwards I quilted the flames with a variegated yellow-orange thread, a little bit thicker than my usual thread.

This is the first time that I quilted a whole quilt (although really small) by machine. I did discover that I have a wonderful sewing foot for quilting. It is meant for satin stichting my manual tells me but it's see-through plastic and has a wide opening at the front - just perfect.

It took me some time to figure out in which way to bind the quilt. I did not want to make a border as I was afraid of using my iron on the printed surface. I pondered a satin stitched finish for some time but I don't like them. In the end I sewed a small strip (about 1 inch) to the quilt and brought it completely to the background where I sewed it down by hand.

To be honest I am proud of my quilt because I gave it such a lot of thoughts and really went out of my comfort zone when constructing it.

Now off to the new challenge. Think about joining us - it really is a lot of fun!

I'm linking this to Off the Wall Friday.