home
about the artist
gallery
blog
links
contact

Archive for February 8th, 2010

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist

Monday, February 8th, 2010

…Indira Gandhi

I am part of a group, Fiber Artists for Obama. We made this group quilt when he was running for president. It has been appraised for over $5000. It is now traveling in a show with other Obama quilts and is in a book edited by Carolyn Mazloomi which will be available soon.

We are now launching a show about racism and are doing a group quilt with this theme. I made the above block for the quilt. We  have an amazing quilter in Alaska, Maria Shell, who put together our last quilt and did all the quilting.

You may remember that Diane Hock made a quilt for the Twelve X Twelve quilt using organza hands — twelve of them to represent the twelve of us. You can see it here. I loved it and filed the idea away and thought it would work well for what I wanted to do for the racism quilt – a positive graphic of hands of all colors outstretched.

I did about 3 of these and they just didn’t look right. Once they were fused, they were really wonky.  I finally realized that I needed a six pointed pattern to help me line them up. So I drew this with my trusty compass.

See, high school geometry can come in handy.