Renovation:

In April I began retrofitting many of my smaller art pieces to make them suitable for attaching to a stretched canvas frames. I call this adventure Operation Renovation. The topic of today’s journal entry is an item that I first revealed in July, 2018. This specimen was called Court House Friends 7 of 14. Court house friends is a reference to a grouping of court house blocks I received in a block swap. The blocks had colors that I was not particularly fond of. Rather than leaving them as is I opted to turn them into improv art pieces; sixteen different art projects resulted from that experiment. The pieced center, with its surrounding white border, looked like this in July, 2018.

Court House Friends 7 of 14, AP # 52

In The Beginning:

To modify Court House Friends 7 of 14 I began by removing the facings and other components that had been attached to the back. After carefully trimming and pressing my small art piece I went in search of a fabric that would compliment the colors already present in the small quilt. I found a lovely purple and teal batik with accents of rust and burgundy. I chose this one because not only did it match with the colors in the existing art piece but it also added an interesting element that didn’t provide a distraction.

Wrapping It Up:

Court House Friends 7 of 14 originally measured 5 7/8” x 10 7/8”. The target frame size was 11” x 14”. After making a few calculations I cut properly sized strips of fabric to add as borders. With the borders attached I created a quilt sandwich by stacking the renovated art quilt with a layer of batting and backing. The last step, in this renovation process, was quilting. The new borders were the only items that needed quilting; to those I added a zig zag pattern with a multi-colored variegated thread.

New Identity:

Since the visual identity of my fiber art piece had been changed I decided its name should be as well. While viewing the composition I studied the arrangement of the fabrics in the pieced center. The single vertical line with the horizontal protrusions reminded me of the rungs on a ladder. Identifying that image gave me the inspiration to name my art quilt Up The Ladder, Art Piece # 52.

When my new and improved project was finished, this is how it appeared.

Up The Ladder, Art Piece # 52

Even though the changes were relatively minor I think she looks much prettier now. How about you?

Thank You:

Thank you for being here and for reading until the very end!

Warm Wishes,

Cindy Anderson