Elaine Rich's Quilting Page
A Gallery of Some of My Quilts
2010, 86" x 68" Cotton. Hand and machine pieced, machine quilted,
hand embellished.
My
view of
Each block in the quilt tells a story through a combination of the fabric in the window and the embellishments that accompany it. Click on the picture of the quilt for a bigger image that lets you see more of the detail. You should be able to blow it up and scroll around. There is also a spreadsheet that describes each of the blocks, showing both the fabrics and the embellishments. You can view the blocks arranged by theme or you can sort by row and/or column to view the blocks as they appear in the quilt. (To make the sorting work correctly, you may have to indicate explicitly that there is no header row.)
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.
Voronoi for Ann
2003,
Cotton. Machine
pieced and quilted. Slightly
embellished.
I
made this quilt as a surprise for my friend Ann Daniel’s 50th
birthday. Her husband Jim helped me spirit
some favorite photos out of the house so that I could transfer them to
fabric. The design is a Voronoi
diagram. Each region has a focal point
that’s a photo that is significant to Ann.
The other fabrics in the region pick up the theme of the center
piece. So, for example, there is a
region for trips that Ann and Jim have enjoyed.
Other regions represent favorite foods, Ann’s childhood, their home in
This
design is relatively easy to make. Start
with gridded interfacing the size of the final
quilt. Draw the Voronoi
diagram, then cut the interfacing on the region
boundaries. To make one region: place
the focal point somewhere in the region.
Then use the sew and flip technique, as for a log cabin, to grow the region
outward until it is completely covered (plus a seam allowance) with
fabrics. Finally, sew the regions
together, using the cut lines of the interfacing as the seam lines.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Provençal
2000, 84" x 84" Cotton. Machine
pieced and hand appliquéed, machine quilted.
I fell in love with Provençal fabrics on a trip to
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