But here it is, a mere ll days late, hot off the sewing machine. Detail above.
What, you might ask does this quilt have to do with time. The agave shown is a Century Plant, one of my favorite plants and images of my home here in Pipe Creek. This year, after the drought broke in the fall, it seems that many of the agaves are blooming, sending up their 20 foot stalks almost overnight. The hummingbirds love them and fight over the bright yellow blossoms.
The story is, of course, that these spiny giant "leafed" agaves grow for a hundred years before blooming -- that's an exageration, but many of the big plants will be 20 years old before blooming, depending on the weather and water conditions. And, after the stalk dries, the blooms turn to pods of thousands of tiny seeds, the mother plant dies, leaving behind a field of potential plants to start growing when it rains again.
So the time connection is the Century Plant and its blooms; the sunset and whirling fields of energy suggested by the colors of the background, the bones and fossil prints that can be barely seen in the strip of fabric at the bottom of the quilt.
On a technical note: the image was a photograph turned into a high contrast image with Photoshop, the red and purple fabric is a piece of soy wax batik. The other fabrics are all stamped images developed in my Petroglyph/Prehistory image workshop that was just held this past weekend at my studio here in Pipe Creek. The piece is fused, machine quilted and also has a tiny bit of Paintstick metallic rubbings on the surface. As with all my unmounted art quilts I zigzag the edges with multiple passes, colors of thread and sizes of stitch to finish the edge in a many I find works well for these raw edge fused applique works.
