Art Quilts Around The World : Art Nouveau Reveal

My online art quilt group called Art Quilts Around the World has a two month challenge and January 31st is reveal day. The subject of this challenge is art nouveau. I googled art nouveau and learned what this type of art was classified as-curved lines, nature themes such as leaves, flowers, branches, women with long flowing hair, warm colors, pastels and lots of golds/browns. Our size requirements is small at 11.5" x 16.5" so lots of detailed curvy flowery stuff seemed too difficult to accomplish. I have been pinning (Pinterest) various images of the letter "L" since it's my initial and had this cute art nouveau version which I interpreted into fabric for my challenge piece.

I drew the design to the challenge size and was thinking positive and negative space. I created a single applique piece with lots of cutting which I fused to the pastel yellow batik background. The only other piece was the small eye/eyebrow. It was time consuming but that was my challenge. I have been using a lot of yellow in my latest quilts and I think it is because of winter and yellow is cheery to me!! I selected burgundy as the applique color because I wanted high contrast, the yellow batik had a hint of pink in it and, even though art nouveau has a lot of nature themes, I rejected forest green because it reminded me too much of my NFL football team the Green Bay Packers!!

I embellished the flowers in the woman's hair with gold rhinestones and the other  flowers had centers with burgundy beads. I kept it simple and I actually like this little quilt and I hung it near my work area at the hair salon where I work.

The blog to see the other artists work is www.aroundtheworldin20quilts.blogspot.com. Our next challenge due March 31st is about song lyrics while borrowing one of the other artist's style. I'm not comfortable with that and may change the rules and just do my thing!! So many songs to chose from!