Australasian Quilt Convention (AQC) 2022

To my complete surprise my art quilt Mother Nature received the Viewers’ Choice award at the Australasian Quilt Convention Challenge ‘Going Green’! It was the first time I have entered this prestigious art quilt competition, and it was certainly exciting to see the exhibition go ahead in May 2022, after sending off my quilt in March 2020!

To create this quilt I took a photo of a mossy rock and manipulated it in the Procreate app. I then created a digital ‘painting’ of face in the app as well. This design was printed at Next State printing in Fitzroy Melbourne on a satin polyester fabric.  I designed the quilting in the app (seriously the most useful app I have!) and printed a full size pattern of the leaves and creatures on paper at Officeworks. I traced the pattern onto water soluble fabric and put this over my sandwiched quilt. The leaves I quilted with Glide polyester threads and the creatures were thread-painted with rayon and 100wt silk threads. I certainly needed all my green threads to get the shading I wanted in the thread-paintings!

 Artist Statement: For every animal we see, there are many more we don’t see. Take a closer look to discover more of the wonders that Mother Nature has created.  It is the details, textures, colours and extraordinary variety of creatures, which delights and intrigues me. I find it heartbreaking that we may lose so many precious critters if we don’t go green, some before we have even known them. Did you know that while beetles make up a quarter of all described species, it is estimated that 90% of them have yet to be discovered! Mother Nature has sure been busy!