I designed this quilt for the 2008 Quilting Arts magazine calendar competition. It was a finalist in the competition, and was given a “Judges’ Choice” award. It appears in the August/September 2007 issue of Quilting Arts.
The competition had the theme “A Novel Idea,” and artists were asked to create quilts about their favorite books. Mine is based on Toni Morrison’s novel about an African-American girl growing up in horrible violence, her descent into madness, and her dream to have blue eyes like Shirley Temple so she would be accepted and loved.
For this piece, I sketched
the eye from photos I had taken of my blue-eyed daughter and of one of her African-American classmates. I made patterns from the sketch, then fused hundreds of small pieces of fabric down and heavily thread painted it before quilting.
All work,
unless noted,
is original and
is protected by copyright.