Elaine Rich's Quilting
A
Gallery of Some of My Quilts
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