Art Quilts Around The World Facebook Group Challenge: Communication - Social Memes

My Facebook art quilt group Art Quilts Around the World's bimonthly reveal day is today and the theme is Communication. I chose social memes because I am on Facebook a lot and see plenty of them. They make me laugh and they make me question things.

I am upset with the 2016 Presidential election in the USA and not sure how to channel my anger. Making art with a social theme has worked in the past so why not now.

There is a resistance against Donald Trump and the word "resist" has appeared on social memes. I love the Statue of Liberty and think she is a great representation of America so I combined the word resist with Lady Liberty.

I needed to Google images of The Statue of Liberty for details and found this close up of her face. Not very feminine in my opinion and she seems to be scowling! Her lips look like Elvis Presley lips! I used my line drawing style portrait quilt technique and drew an image with the non-feminine face. I have the left side with reds and the right side with blues and whites in the middle to represent the colors of the USA and our flag.

I usually add a lot of embellishments to my quilts but this quilt seemed busy enough and only added the standard white dot of fabric paint for the eye reflection and a few plastic star shaped buttons.

The next challenge is called The Eyes Have It. Any chance I get I make a portrait quilt and the eyes are my favorite part so this one will be super easy and I have to do something out of the box due May 31st.

Bonfire: Urban Bright Challenge from BasAss Quilters Society

BadAss Quilters Society is a page on Facebook which explores going against the grain of traditional quilters and the proper "rules!" The so called quilting police can be judgmental and this group has created a place for the quilters who are not good at following these rules and are artsy and doing their own thing! They have created a new challenge based on a line of fabric by Frond Design Studio called Urban Brights. The line had coordinating solids to use but sparingly.

I started with a design of a woman with long gloves and a rockabilly hairstyle with a scarf tied around her head.

I used 4 of the 5 prints with peace symbols as the background. One of the more subtle prints for the outside border, the print with the license plate for the dress and head scarf and the facial features fussy cut from one of the large scale prints. The hair, neck/upper torso and the face are from the accent fabrics. They are calling this bright fabric and I tend to disagree! I love brights and knew if I was going to enjoy making this quilt I would need to use the accent colors and sparingly was difficult for me! I flipped the red orange and the yellow fabrics and used the wrong side to get another value of those fabrics for the facial and hair highlighting.

In the last photo in this blog post I have a picture of the funky multicolored thread that can be turned into a rusched thread by pulling one of the threads. I purchased it at the IQF Houston show a few years ago. I used it once before but not to the extent I used it here. The challenge rules stated embellishments were okay to use so I got my bright fix by hand sewing this rusched thread around the border seam and was happy with the result!

This is my original drawing the applique pieces are derived from. I only draw one eye/brow and flip it from it's reversed side to the normal side to get both eyes for the fused applique. I decided to put the head scarf bow on the other side.

This is the ad campaign on Facebook on BadAss Quilters Society's blog.

This is my photo of the fabrics before I started using them. The upper left fabric is my outer border. I only used 3 out of the 6 accent fabrics shown in the lower part of the photo.

This is a face close up photo. I used fabric paint and markers to add definition to the face. A bit of glitter nail polish on the eyes for bling. The fabrics were pretty active so a bunch of bling seemed garish. The quilt is titled Bonfire because of the hair color. Redken, my favorite hair color company and retail products, has a demi color Shades EQ which is a bright auburn and that how I named it. When the quilt was finished I thought the woman looked like the actress Emma Stone. Thoughts....

The fun rainbow thread I used to embellish with!

The contest rules state to blog about our entry then apply on their Facebook page. The month of March is for applying and I will be begging everyone to vote for my quilt when the time comes available in April!