Blogger's Quilt Festival: Art Quilt Entry

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Art Quilts

It's time once again for the fabulous Blogger's Quilt Festival.  If you haven't checked it out yet, you should- it's always a great opportunity to find lots and lots of fabulous new quilts and bloggers.

If this is your first time visiting here, thanks for clicking through and I hope you'll come back in the future!

This is my entry in the Art Quilt category, a piece called Gloria Patri which I finished earlier this year.  You can see more about it by clicking the Gloria Patri tag in the sidebar.

It's part of a series I'm working on depicting pieces of the Anglican Liturgy, and inspired by the style and motifs found in illuminated manuscripts.  The wording is printed with my handmade silk screens, and features the text of the Gloria Patri (Gloria Patri, et Fili, et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saeculum saeculorum amen.) spiraling out both directions from the center.  The central Gloria is an ambigram, that is it reads "gloria" both right side up and upside down.

 I then quilted the piece around all the letters and then with the floral/branchy/leafy fillers.  The quilting colors ranged from various shades of red/blue through to green/purple.  Unfortunately, once I was finished with the quilting, the whole thing felt washed out, so I went back and painted in all the quilting motifs.

The label reads "There is no top and no bottom, there is only the center.  How to regain the center when equilibrium is lost?  Slow, repetitive, meditative stitching; slow repetitive, meditative prayer."  The piece feels to me like a meditation labyrinth, where pacing along a defined path give your brain and heart a chance to rest and refocus.

Many thanks to Amy for hosting the Blogger's Quilt Festival, and to all those who clicked through to see my quilt!