For those of you
who don’t know me, I am Mary Anne Henderson and I have a quilt shop called Red
Hen. Since we closed the store for a couple of months so we could relocate, I
decided to live up to promises I’ve made for years and start a bloggie thing. I
think of it as a way to talk with people like I do at the store -- a diablog!
Okay, now that I
have had some time at home, I’ve decided to gird my loins and whatever else
you’re supposed to gird, and finally begin a major (meaning a big commitment of
time) quilt. After talking around the subject for several years, I finally got
myself together. Why is it so scary to start a big independent project like
this? I don’t know for sure, but I guess it is fear of failure. But really you
only fail if you quit and at the worst you can call it a UFO and say you’ll
finish it later!
Also, all my
projects grow like Topsie (as my Mom used to say). They just get bigger and
more complex until I end up in a form of slavery. But this time I am going to
try to control what my husband calls “project creep.” It won’t be that intense;
really.
(This is my
dialogue with myself.)
So now that I have
had a few false starts and am finally fully involved, I’ve decided to share
this process with anyone who cares to tune in from time to time. So here we
have sort of Part One of Here We Go Again or the Rise of the Phoenix.
Why this image, why
this subject? Where did I start? These are some of the things people ask me.
You have to start somewhere. As they say in the design world, “limitations are
your friend.” I have always loved the color and drama of Asian design, so I
decided to make a quilt to act as a pair for my dragon quilt. There are many
images of phoenixes, many very similar; I probably saw 50 beautiful ones on
various Goth and fantasy web sites. I decided this project should be slow and
careful instead of manic and “heavy.”
My Chinese friend,
Bo Fan, loaned me two silk textiles from China with wonderful images. I looked
at books, and at other fabrics, just to name a few sources.
One dead end was
trying to convert a classic crane image to a phoenix. It actually looked fine,
but it was just too static when blown up to a life sized image. Not enough fire
in the body attitude.
I knew I would do
some floral quilting so my idea was to make this phoenix as spring, rising from
a garden. I wanted motion, flame, and flowers mixed, a rather breathless feel,
as opposed to the formal pose of the image I was working with.
I went back to the
drawing board (literally) and here are some of the things I decided to knit
together to form a phoenix.
Bo told me that the
Chinese phoenix image you see commonly has the tail up and the head down to
show female submissiveness. The last empress of China dared to change the image
on textiles in her palace and had the phoenix head facing up. Guess which way I
decided my bird would go!
The most wonderful
image I found was a textile from Quilt Gate, a vendor I love. The flailing
feathers knocked me out. I cut out that image from the fabric and did some
surgery, adding a number of feathers. Here is my collage sketch of the original
image, with a few large feathers duplicated. But it had no pronounced tail,
just a couple of large flailing feathers. Next step -- bird butt surgery.
Peace, love, and
rock ’n roll!
Mary Anne
1 comment:
Nice blog... thanks for sharing with us..
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