Personal Logograph Series

Earlier in the year, I had an idea for an artwork.  How I envisioned it required a different technique than my usual way of working.  I was thinking about using paint on top of the quilting.  Deidre Adams does this. (I love the textures she creates this way.)  Linda and Laura Kemshall, who wrote the book, The Painted Quilt, also use this technique.

I wanted to make the piece kind of big, but didn't want to get to the end and ruin it with the paint. So, I decided to do some test pieces first.

For the first piece, I just sewed together some scraps of my hand dyed fabrics.  I fused on my shapes and machine stitched them down.  I did my free motion quilting and then painted over the whole piece with white acrylic paint.  I wanted a "halo" effect around the shapes.  So I didn't paint near the edges of the shapes.

Here is the first test piece.

 Personal Logograph #1

hand dyed and commercial fabric,

machine stitched, paint

9-1/4 x 9-1/4"

©2012 Lisa Flowers Ross

You might be wondering what a logograph is.  A logograph (or logogram) is a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent a word or phrase.  I made up my own symbol that represents a particular word to me.  What word does it bring to mind when you look at it?

What I learned from this first test was that I didn't like how the paint accumulated on the edge of the seams and seemed to emphasize them.  I also wanted the "halo" to stand out more. I liked the "halo" effect around the stitching lines, which is what I was going for as well.

Tomorrow, I will show you the second test piece.