Elaine Rich's Quilting Page
A Gallery of Some of My Quilts
2009
– 2010, Approximately 76" x
56" Cotton. Hand and machine
pieced, machine quilted, hand embellished.
I am working on a quilt that attempts to capture my vision of our country. It’s going to be an attic window quilt, very much like the quilt I made for my friend Dilip’s baby. The center of each window will portray some aspect of our history or our culture. Each window will be embellished with something that accents its theme. I’m planning for the finished quilt to have 266 windows. I’ve been collecting both fabrics and “doodads” for about a year. But I’m wondering whether there are topics that I’ve overlooked. If you’d like to offer suggestions for additional things I should include, take a look at the spreadsheet that shows what I’ve got so far. And let me know what you think I’m missing. I can’t guarantee that I can find fabrics for everything we think of, but there are lots of fabrics out there and eBay is an amazing resource. So I can try.
Dancers
1991, 42" x 42" Silk and cotton.
Hand appliquéed, machine pieced, hand quilted.
I made this quilt for my father, who, at the
age of 70, took up dancing, and has become almost as
fanatic about it as I have about quilting. The nonappliquéed
blocks form a graduated "subquilt" that
serves as a background for the appliquéed dancers.
The subquilt is graduated, and flows from light to
dark and from pink to purple. It simply wasn't possible, at the time I was
making this quilt, to find enough pink and purple on white background fabrics,
so several of the pieces at the top of the quilt were hand painted, often
starting with a black and white print and then filling them in with pink and
purple. Dancers was displayed at the 1992 Austin Area
Quilt Guild show and at the 1992 IAQA show in
Flowing Blues
1992, 84" x 84" Cotton. Machine
pieced and quilted.
This is a graduated quilt that I made as a
wedding present for my friends Susan Brienza and
Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky. Their initials, S and J, are in
the medium blue region in the bottom half of the quilt. The bluebonnets in the
center represent the fact that the quilt was made in
53 Flavors
1993, 42" x 53"
Cotton, Machine pieced, hand appliquéed, and machine quilted.
This quilt was inspired by a picture on the
back of a menu at a 50's revival diner. I looked at the sort of air-brushed picture
of an ice cream soda and suddenly realized I could do ice cream in fabric.
Collecting the ice cream fabrics turned out to be easy. Some hand dyed and
marbled ones worked particularly well. The cones were a bit more of a problem,
so there are some duplicated fabrics in them. The jelly beans in the border tie
the colors together and the candies in the border insets reinforce the
"sweets" theme. The back of this quilt is perfect -- it's huge ice
cream cones with dripping pink ice cream. Mary Shepherd found it for me.
Cadre of Cats
1993, 43" x 59" Cotton. Machine
pieced and hand appliquéed. Still not quilted.
Most of the cats are pieced, but three of
them are appliquéed from cat prints. I would have
liked to have made all the pieced cats from cat prints, but there weren't
enough of the them at the time. The block design for this quilt is an
interesting tessellation. The black background sections are the same cat shapes
as the foreground cats. It's a bit hard to see at first, but once you see it,
it won't go away.
Tumbling Yukatas
1993, 55" x 60" Cotton. Hand
pieced and machine quilted.
I love the tumbling blocks design, and I
realized that, with a little cheating around the edges, I could work a yukata shpae in among the blocks.
And without any cheating I could use some whole hexagons to show off a few
larger designs, such as the Japanese kamons (family
crests) that are appliquéed on several of the
hexagons. About half the fabrics are Japanese yukata
samples. The others are American fabrics whose designs look somewhat Japanese.
Finding such fabrics was not very difficult because blues in general are easy
to find and because Japanese designs have been very popular for the last
several years. Although most of the fabrics are blue and white, some of the yukata samples have splashes of other colors. The quilting
is primarily yukata shapes in various sizes, tumbling
down the quilt. Tumbling Yukatas was exhibited at the
1994 Austin Area Quilt Guild show.
Fanfare
1993, 88" x 84" Cotton. Machine
pieced, hand appliquéed, and machine quilted.
I love teal and turquoise, and discovered
that I had collected a lot of fabrics in these colors, just because I liked
them. So I needed something to do. Fans are fun to work with because you can
make each fan out of a few fabrics that work well together, then worry later
about the global design. The crazy quilt layout made this particularly easy,
since the fans didn't all have to be the same size or the same shape. In July,
1993, my father had prostate surgery in Washington, D.C. Alan and I went up to
spend three weeks with him when he got out of the hospital. I took a whole
suitcase full of turquoise and teal fabrics home to
Shades of Gray
1994, 50" x 66" Cotton. Machine
pieced and quilted.
This quilt started out as an attempt to experiment
with various designs that could be made with half-square triangles (and an
occasional square with an interesting accent fabric). It was supposed to be
just white, grey, and black, but that was too boring. First I added the fabrics
with small bits of color. But there was still no spark, so I added the red
stripe. When I added the plain border, the whole thing still seemed static. So
I let a couple of the designs flow into the border, which created a bit more
sense of motion. Shades of Grey was exhibited in the 1994 Austin Area Quilt
Guild show.
1994, 90" x 85" Cotton. Machine
pieced and quilted. This quilt was supposed to be pastel, with small areas of
medium value for contrast. But I needed over 1500 different rectangles, so I
started cutting from all the fabrics I could find. I discovered that my friends
and I gravitate toward deeper colors. We also have a lot more reds and blues
than we do yellows and oranges. Once I got bored with cutting rectangles, I
sketched a very rough layout for the various colors. The uneven bargello design is meant to suggest the sort of
semi-controlled motion of a waterfall. Almost all the fabrics contain a single
salient hue, so each region reads strongly as a single color, just the way the
bands do in a rainbow. Once I had a very rough sketch, I started putting pieces
on my design wall. The final design really came more from the fabrics than from
anything else, as some regions grew and others shrank. Alan calls this quilt
"Dripping Colors".
Autumn Leaves
1994, 45" x 56" Cotton. Machine
pieced and embroidered. Machine quilted. Embellished.
I wanted to do a pastel colorwash.
But such a thing, all by itself, would wash out and be boring. I need some sort
of contrast. I'd read Ruth McDowell's book, Pattern on Pattern, and thought
that her idea of one design literally superimposed on another was a really
great idea. So I decided to see-through burgundy leaves to my pastel colorwash. When the leaves fell on top of yellow, they'd be
orange. On pink, they'd be deep burgundy. On blue, they'd be purple. Of course,
there are more at the bottom, gravity being what it is. When it came time for
the border, I went to the quilt store thinking that what I really needed was
leaf prints that weren't green. I wouldn't have bet much that I'd find them. In
fact, I got to choose, there were so many. So the border itself is a colorwash. Mary Shepherd and I used Autumn Leaves as a
sample in our 1995 AAQG Gift of Quilting Class, Pastel Pizzazz.
One is Crooked
1995, 47" x 38" Cotton. Tubes sewn
by machine and hand stitched together.
I love to collect black and
white fabrics, as does my friend, Mary Shepherd. So this was fun to do. My
favorite fabric in this quilt is one Mary bought several years ago. It looks
like rows of yearbook pictures. I was planning to have all the vertical strips
run perpendicular to the horizontal ones (like the warp on a woven fabric).
But, as I had it laid out, Alan came by and said it was boring. He said I
needed more whimsy. So one is crooked. One is Crooked was exhibited in the 1996
Austin Area Quilt Guild show.
Metamorphosis
1995, 47" x 62" Cotton. Machine
pieced, hand appliquéed, and machine quilted.
I wanted to take another shot at a pastel colorwash. This time I thought that, instead of piecing in
the contrasting design, I'd appliqué it on. I love butterflies, and there are
some great butterfly fabrics available. The bottom of the quilt is meant to
represent ground. It has flowers all over it. The top, obviously, is the sky.
It's filled with butterflies. Alan suggested making a gradual transition from
flowers to butterflies. Nature doesn't do it that way, but it's interesting in
a quilt. So the butterflies at the bottom of the quilt are part flower, part
butterfly. As you move up, you get to the 100% butterflies. To make this quilt,
I needed a foundation. Rather than adding batting to the quilt, I just left the
foundation there and quilted through the top, the foundation, and the back. I
found the perfect back for this quilt. It's a butterfly design, done completely
in pastels. Mary Shepherd and I used Metamorphosis as a sample in our 1995 AAQG
Gift of Quilting Class, Pastel Pizzazz.
Finally
1997, 84" x 84" Cotton. Machine
pieced and quilted.
I made this quilt as a wedding present for
my friends, David Jefferson and Kathy Gilcrest, who were married in September,
1996 after the longest courtship on record. The quilt is a scaled up version of
Jewels in the Night
1995, 96" x 60" Predominately
cotton, with silk, polyester, and velvet center pieces. Hand and machine
pieced, machine quilted.
This quilt was commissioned by a friend,
Elaine Kant, to fill a large blank wall at the office of Scicomp, the
company she had just started. Elaine chose the basic color scheme. We both
wanted a somewhat untraditional design and I'd seen a block similar to this in
Miriam Nathan-Roberts' quilt, The Lady or the Tiger, shown in New Wave Quilt.
When first I saw that quilt, I knew that someday I wanted to make something
like it. This was the day. Although the overall design of the two quilts is
very different, the blocks are very much alike. Some of the fabrics in the
quilt were chosen for their pictures of things that interest the people who
work for the company. The peacock fabric was chosen because there's a peacock
in the woods behind their building, as well as one near Elaine's house. The
name for this quilt was chosen by the people at Scicomp;
they all submitted candidate names and then voted for their favorite. Jewels in
the Night won an award for color in the Innovative Large category at the 1996
Austin Area Quilt Guild show.
Blue
1996, 53" x 80" Cotton. Machine
pieced and quilted.
Making this quilt really put
my collection of blue fabrics to the test. It was a bit different from many of
the colorwashes I've done since there were two
different parallelogram shapes. It was hard to know which column a particular
fabric was going to end up in, so many of them had to be recut.
I tried to use a lot of conversational prints, which turned out not to be too
hard. The hardest thing was dealing with the fact that there are a lot
differences among "blues". You can put a grey one next to a royal
one, even if the values are the same. Fortunately, there were lots of columns,
so I tried to group the various blue colors into columns. By October, 1995, I'd
finished the tweed part of the top. But I didn't know what to do for borders.
So I took the top to the
The Web
1997, 42" x 45" Cotton. Machine
pieced and quilted, with some hand appliqué, and many embellishments.
I started collecting Halloween fabrics some
time around 1993. I couple of years later, I came up with the idea of making a
web and filling each segment with a different fabric. In early 1997, I drew the
design and realized that I could make the actual webbing with bias strips, the
way I'd learned in the stained glass quilt class I'd taken at my first AAQG
Gift of Quilting in 1993. Dorene Cohen decided she wanted to make one of these
too, so one day, we finally sat down and cut out our fabrics. A couple of
months later we got going again. We went to the fabric store and tried out
various colors for the webbing. Purple won, hands down. Because of the trouble
I'd had hanging Round and Round and Triangles, I decided I wanted to appliqué
my web to a background rectangle. I tried various patterned fabrics but they
all competed with the web, so black won. The most fun thing about working on
this quilt was collecting all the "doodads" that are sewn on to it.
There is an amazing amount of Halloween stuff available, so the quilt is
covered with spiders, witches, cats, webs, candy corns, and other random
things. The Web was displayed during October, 1997 at
Five Generations
1998, 51" x 64" Cotton. Hand
pieced, machine quilted.
This was my first quilt that exploits photos
transferred to fabric. There are photos of five generations in Alan's family, from
his and his brother's children back to Alan's great grandparents. Alan did a
lot of work with the pictures to format them so they'd look good on the quilt.
We printed all the photos in black and white, and then transferred them to
colored fabrics. Most of the fabrics are hand dyes and batiks. Alan made two
labels for the back of the quilt. One shows who all the people in all the
pictures are. The other is a family tree that explains how everyone is related.
We gave the quilt to his parents for Christmas, 1998.
1999,
Cotton. Hand and machine pieced, machine
quilted. I’ve made several baby quilts
like. Each includes images that I think
will be meaningful to the parents and to the child, maybe a couple of decades
from now. This one was made for my
friend, Dilip D'Souza, the first Indian I've ever known to come
to the U.S. and then decide to go back home.
He really feels that he needs to be home and work for the things that
matter to him. When he told me that he
and his wife Vibha were expecting their first child, I thought I needed to make
a quilt that he could use to tell his child about
Provençal
2000, 84" x 84" Cotton. Machine
pieced and hand appliquéed, machine quilted.
I fell in love with Provençal fabrics on a trip to