Wednesday, July 30, 2008

a few more

camera is still broke, so i will just show a few more of my old quilts. this first piece is raw edge applique'. i consider myself a hand quilter. this quilt was made by machine because at the time, i was having problems with my hands. this is call "healing hands #2". there is bead work on this piece which was done by hand and i suffer from it in the end. but when you love something so much, you deal with the pain. this is not a good picture of showing the bead work. there are beads on some of the hands, her neck, and breast. this next piece is my black history crazy quilt. done all by hand. it was fun not doing a piece that had to be square. the hand quilting stitching was fun to put on this piece. this third piece that i am showing is one piece that i know i will never let go. every time that i look at this piece, i remember when i started quilting, this piece it represent Juneteenth day. which is celebrated in June for the last slaves set free. one day i went to a juneteenth festival and there were some quilter there selling their quilts. they were also teaching people to make a nine patch block. i tried it and i was hooked. one of the lady's knew me and said, i know you can do this. i went home that night and made my first quilt. my first quilt was a mess, but i kept at it. this piece is a larger virgin of my june
journal piece that i made in 2006, without the quilt block in the left hand corner and a border added to this piece. i just love this piece. the middle piece is a whole cloth, that i drew a slave onto the fabric. machine stitched around the slave and then hand embroidery around the slave and the border piece. i also used colored prima pencils to color the slave. sometime i can draw pretty good and then there are days when i can't draw for nothing. their is a piece that i want to try to make now base on slavery or the election, but i can't seem to draw what i want. i am going to keep at it until i get it.
so stitches for now.

Yetunde

2 comments:

Karoda said...

i just put down a book (too serious reading so late at night and now I can't fall back to sleep) on African American emigration to Africa and the Juneteenth quilt made me shudder...then took a close up view of your African Crazy quilt and felt better.

Grace said...

This piece makes a very, very strong statement, especially with the quilted chains around the center block.
Funnily enough I am now reading a book called "Slaves in the Family". The author has researched the slaves his family owned since the beginning in 1648 and documents it all. Reads like a story sometimes then like a documentary. Interesting.