India... the quilt 2015

At one incredible palace, we saw ancient carved stone window screens with geometric patterns, called jali.  Women of nobility in these palaces could only see the outside world through the protective (and imprisoning) screen of the jali. Like the windows of our tour bus, they were both protective, and both limiting.

I decided to make a bus window into a jali, using many photos of our bus, and other buses, and Photoshop. 

I made the images into thermofax screens, and printed them on white cotton. Then began the somewhat tedious process of fusing the cotton to batting material, cutting out the window openings, and sewing back the edges to create a jali-like screen:

Here is the original layout of the image under the jali...

..made of Indian textiles, photos printed on cloth and prayer flags.

And here is the finished quilt, jali (39"h x 27"w), with details:

If you look along the bottom of the quilt, you can see many of the images from the last post on India.

Women working, carrying bricks, mixing cement, while wearing beautiful fragile saris. Look closely, and you'll see different images of jalis, plus one ceramic version.

While in India, I bought some patchworks which were sewn together from scraps of various textiles. The pieces were roughly patched together with a thick, couched yarn, as in this sample:

I used the same couching technique to outline some of my images:

To be clear, I was NOT on an All India tour. I just used that wording to help identify the bus image. 

OK, that's it for cartographic quilting and travel-related posts. Starting Monday, I'm finally ready to share a whole new direction in my art, one that I've been working on for over a year now.