Arts and Old Lace

I (Sue) was tagged to participate in the Facebook "Share Your Art" challenge, where you post 3 pictures of your quilts for 5 days, and tag someone else each day to share as well.  Today was my first day of sharing and I chose 2 quilts that I did for a local Arts and Old Lace challenge in 2012.  They recently returned from touring in exhibits and I'm not sure I ever blogged about them before.  Consequently, I thought they would be good to share on the blog as well, especially since both feature Thermofax screen printing.  For this challenge, we received a bag that contained various lace remnants and were to incorporate some of it in an 18" quilt - however you chose to interpret "arts and old lace".

The piece above is Architectural Lace.  The screen printed images here are made from photos I took of various architectural images such as round windows in churches and decorative elements of Victorian houses.  By cropping those elements out of the photos I converted them to black & white images to create Thermofax screens.  The lace panel with the buttons on it and the narrower bands of lace were all from the challenge bag.  Below is a detail of one part of the printing.

The second piece I call Nature's Lace.  I combined screens of a fern and Queen Anne's lace to create the composition below.  The center of the fern "flower" is also from a piece of lace in the challenge bag. The butterflies are another screen - I showed how I created them with fusible applique in another post recently.

Here's a close-up of the printing and quilting on this one.  It was a challenge as well to figure out how to quilt such "lacey" elements as the ferns and QA lace.