Mandala Challenge Met for Quilts Around The World Blog

The group Quilts Around The World is a group of women art quilters from around the globe, (Australia, The Netherlands, Europe, USA)...who take up a challenge every three months to make a small art quilt and post it on our blog. http://aroundtheworldin20quilts.blogspot.com/
Go there to see ALL the quilts as they are terrific...The most recent challenge was to make an art quilt in the theme : Mandala!

Mine is this machine felted velvet butterfly on a substrait of hand painted muslin, machine sewn free motion style and using some fancy machine stitches. Embellished with glass beads.Click on the photos to see the texture and detail close up.

Let me know if you can FEEL the velvet!
I often like the backs of my pieces as much as the fronts.

Happy New Year!

Simply Dreadful

I made this portrait art quilt for my 19 yr old grandson for Chanukah. He does wear his hair in dread locks, and leads a hippie-like life style.

This is the photo I started with.

I took artistic licence to color the dreads brightly. The dreadlocks are made from rolled up hand dyed repurposed dryer sheets. The face is made up of layers of cotton fabrics, the base is hand dyed cotton by Chris at Dye Candy.

The substrait fabic is brown felt, bound in cotton. I have top sewn the entire background in swirls using brown varaigated and gold metallic threads. Some of the swirls are painted with paint sticks. I love the 3-dementionality of the piece.

click on photos to enlarge

The head and hair are hand sewn to the background piece, as

is the binding.

Let me know what you think.

It's 17" X 19".

I will probably make this again, as I would love to enter it into a show.