My Creative Space is Home

I am SO excited to show all of you in blogland my first ever art quilt. And it's perfect that I finished it this afternoon just in time for My Creative Space. Pieces of it have been all over my creative space all week.

A week ago my friend Kate featured her entry in the Breaking Traditions Art Quilt Exhibit on her facebook page. Breaking Traditions hosts an art quilt exhibit each year at the American Sewing Expo in Novi, Michigan. Although the art quilt exhibit occurs each year I'd never heard of it. Yippee for Kate!

A quick aside about Kate: she's an amazing artist, skilled at all things sewingish, super sweet, always thoughtful and she has this slightly sarcastic, fairly self-centred but always witty monkey named Nigel who has his own blog. Last year Kate gave me the heads up about an opportunity to exhibit a few of my sock softies at American Sewing Expo.

The instructions for the exhibit are to make an art quilt measuring 12 inches square which embodies the theme "home." My piece is called "Side to Side", referring to the two sides of Michigan where we have lived over the past 16 plus years.

Here is how I did it:
1) Traced my own designs onto white fabric with crayons. I colored them, ironed off the excess and put them in the dryer on high for 15 minutes. I wanted to make sure nothing was smudging.
2) I added the embroidered details using stem, split, satin stitch and french knots.
3) The layers of the top were appliqued. Next time I will fuse them before I stitch them. I had a little bit of shifting that made a few less than perfectly flat places.
4) I machine quilted the fabrics and then added the binding trim.

I made lots of rookie mistakes, learned heaps while working on it but I'm all aglow now in "Look What I Did" joy. And for more joy hop over the see more My Creative Spaces.