Baby Isabelle Jackson's New Quilt

At the end of 2023, a new baby girl was welcomed to the extended family:  Baby Isabelle Jackson, daughter of my niece Rachel and her husband Court.  Happily, this gave me an excuse to create an original crib quilt measuring 49" wide by 53" high.  Some history:  In 2015, I went to India with two friends on a quest to discover fabric artists in the state of Gujarat.  Along the way we discovered the Rann of Kutch's wildlife santuary and stayed briefly at the Rann Riders Resort.  On a mini safari we saw many exotic (to me) birds including Painted Storks, a Snake Eagle, black-headed Ibis, Egrets and Greater Flamingos among others. I drew many of the birds once we got back from our trip, and created the bird fabric printed on the quilt back above.  Unfortunately I had only taken a little Canon Powershot G15 camera, which was not good enough for great bird photos. The beauty of applique is that I could use my photos as reference to create the stork image on the quilt front.  This was done by making an Adobe Illustrator image, which was then used as a template for the final fabric applique design.  Many of the quilt fabrics were purchased from Britex in San Francisco with a mix of soft whites, pastel pinks, cotton satins and more. The basic design was created with Electric Quilt's EQ8 software, then modified by accident, or intent, as the quilt was being built.   The memory of the trip, bird motif, and the quality of the different fabrics made working on the quilt another level of pleasure.

"Sewing Tools Used and New" - a Recently Finished New Art Quilt

This quilt happened for a couple of reasons: 
1.  I started collecting old scissors on a trip to Indiana in 2013, after enviously noting my artist aunt Reva's scissor collection.  This forced me to take a class on flash photography, and buy a flash attachment for my camera, in order to accurately photograph my old scissors.  That done, the scissors were photoshopped into a polka dot star pattern I designed.
2.  On a trip to the Galapagos in 2017, a fellow traveler was always sewing and I spent a couple of hours doing a watercolor of her pin cushion, which I liked a lot.  So I printed it onto fabric.
3.  I made the mistake of going into Britex Fabrics in SF (before they moved this year), thinking I would only look, and exited with scissor and pin cushion fabrics plus some complimentary blue and white fabric as well.  I needed to do something with them.
Once all of the above happened, I thought I'd put all the elements together and make a quilt I could enter into a cool quilt contest.  The problem is my craft abilities are inferior to my creative abilities so the finished quilt, being slightly imperfect, would probably never get accepted in a craft quilt contest.  Additionally, after photographing the quilt, I transformed it in Photoshop to neatly fill a unified space and find it now looks slightly more warped than it really is.  So the only place this quilt will be featured for now is here.  It will be live for viewing at my Marin Open Studios this coming May, however.