May TIF - Part I

What do you call yourself and why?

was May's TIF Challenge concept question. I got started on it last weekend. Yes, I know it's the end of June but I liked the concept question and decided to do the assignment anyway.

Presently, if asked, I call myself a mother and a quilt artist. Making this small quilt top partly addressed the identity of quilt artist. In addition I included a strip of a traditional quilt block: flying geese, to further speak to this identity in a straightforward way. I decided to use an anatomical human heart to describe my role as a mother. In western culture the heart is used to represent or symbolize many of the attributes that are essential in the day to day care and nurturing of young children. Among these, love and compassion, honesty, forgiveness, and joy, are supremely important. Additional requirements necessary for effective parenting, and commonly symbolized by the human heart, include stamina, endurance, strength, good health and steadfastness. The image of a heart was drawn by Jason Reid and used with permission. I fragmented the heart to represent the reality of struggle or hardship, which along with joy, is part of family life. In overall design the quilt is a simple collage of fabrics.

The piece was made as a prototype for a larger quilt that I want to make, to further address the question posed by the May TIF challenge question in which I intend to use several unfinished drawings that I made recently in a drawing class. Here in the smaller quilt, I experimented with photo transfer paper for textiles and used three different products to transfer the drawing of the human heart onto fabric. The products I tried were June Tailor Print 'n Press, Wilton Easy Image fabric transfers and HP iron on transfers. I was most happy with the results that I obtained with the HP transfer paper, as it was the least stiff and resulted in less colour distortion than the other two products. It was also the least expensive.

Oh yeah, and don't forget to flip your image before you print it to the transfer paper as the transferred image will be the reverse of what is printed on the paper. As you can tell, if you closely examine the image of the heart.

In truth, I would like to find another way to transfer drawings and digital images to fabric, one that would better retain the hand of the fabric which transfer papers do not do. Something that I would like to learn more about, is digital printing with fibre reactive dyes, a technique used by quilt artists Michael James and Miriam Nathan-Roberts. If you use digital image transfer techniques in your textile art which you can recommend please leave me a comment or drop me a line about what works for you.