Tag Archive for fabric wall hangings

“Dalton’s Garden” – the Beginning of a new Meditation Garden

"Dalton's Garden" - an art quilt designed for meditationI thought with this posting, that I would show you how I go about creating my art quilt Meditation Gardens. The images for this series is created by me tapping into a person’s energy field and then creating a visual representation of a place where they would be enthusiastic to energetically play and meditate. This one, “Dalton’s Garden” was designed to honor the new man who has come into my life, so creating the image has been pretty easy to do.(wry smile!)

The first thing I do before beginning one of these Meditation Gardens, is to tap into the person’s energy field and wait to be “shown” what place would be optimal for that person. With regard to Dalton, that was pretty easy, as we do a lot of energy work together. He lives in northern Florida now, and loves huge thunder storms, as the energy is electrifying and exciting for him, as it is for me, too. So instead of the usual sunny sky that I might put in other people’s gardens, he has some serious cumulonimbus thunderheads billowing in the background. I found a great purple blue batik fabric that looked as if the dye had run down the length of it. I cut irregular pieces of it and fastened them on horizontally to make the fingers of rain off in the distance in this scene.

The colored center section is made of three layers to make the quilt sandwich, the top embellished layer, the middle section composed of batting, and the backing fabric. Only the backing fabric, a white muslin extends outwards in these pieces. There, that fabric is attached to a frame with especially sharp thumbtacks that I got from the Canadian embroidery supply company, Berlin Embroidery Designs . Their web site is full of information and supplies for serious embroidery fanatics. The actual frame for this piece is larger than those sold by Berlin Embroidery, and came from another Canadian company, Hearthside Craftworks. They make beautiful floor embroidery frames that I lust after, but their simple 4 stretcher frame bars that I’m using here are elegant constructions of beautiful craftsmanship. Their dovetail joints fit perfectly tight so that you can get a true 90 degree angle for a perfect rectangle(or square). Both companies have wonderful customer service people, and while the shipping may be as much as the product if you’re not ordering very much, I found that it was worth it, as I haven’t found this quality of products for what I need here in the States.

Here, you can see more of the beautiful purple/blue batik that I used to make the rain clouds. I accentuated some of the horizontal lines with closely spaced quilting stitches tDetail of an art quilt created by tapping into a person's energy field, "Dalton's Garden"o make the blurry areas that looked like rain puff out some from the background. I hope that I can restrain myself and not cover up too much of the fabric with beads as I often do. The same sun/portal orb that I used in the original Meditation Garden, “Keith’s Garden” has a similar place in “Dalton’s Garden”. (It’s just too good of a design not to use as the entrance portal to “come into the scene”.) The center area is surrounded by a gold frame about 1.5″ or 4 cm square, with a larger metal frame that is 2″ or 5 cm square. That larger frame originally housed glass squares that were intended to enclose some thin collages, but I chose to cover them with gold, metallic floss using a blanket stitch to cover the metal frame.

I love to use commercial ribbons to create stripes in my work, and there are a lot of fun ones out there in the craft and fabric stores right now. I used two colors of harlequin diamond ribbons to suggest garden structures in the piece, such as trellises. However, no matter how much I stand back and look at the piece, I find it amazing that there are often some pieces that I don’t see to be crooked, such as the top of the black and white piece in the upper right until I see the art photographed. One of my favorite art/science books is VISION AND ART – THE BIOLOGY OF SEEING, by Margaret Livingstone. While it’s rather pricey, it is one of my most valued books in my collection. The extensive photographs and illustrations go a long way to explain how our eyes are not cameras, but do a lot of interpretation of what we’re seeing. A real camera doesn’t have that option, (or flaw) so it only records what is actually there. Fortunately, the crooked top of the black and white ribbon in the upper right of this photo had not been stitched down too much yet, so when you see it in the photos in the next blog, you’ll see that it was straightened. Otherwise, if it had already gotten too much embellishment to rip out stitches, (which I HATE to do) I would have added some sort of motif, probably lace or big buttons, to distract the eye from the crookedness.

I am incredibly excited about the beginning of this new Meditation Garden, and the man for whom it was designed at least professes to really like it. (I guess what’s he going to say since the relationship is rather new!) The next few weeks will have more photos as the piece progresses, but in the meantime, you can still access the commands on how to use the energy fields embedded in these art quilts by going to the page in the right hand navigational panel,entitled Transition Portals – Meditation Gardens. There you will find the phrases to say to allow you to tap into the energy fields in these pieces.

How do you tap into your own creative energy when you’re working in your own art medium? Do you have a structured method to access your Muses or do you go with the flow?

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