Sustained Investigation Sculpture #1

Patched by Flowers

34 x 33 x 1 in.

This is the first sustained investigation 'sculpture.' The theme of my investigation is flowers, so I needed to incorporate flowers into the project. I decided to make a quilt while incorporating a flower patterned fabric. I made a quilt because I wanted to make something that had some sort of use for it instead of another generic artwork. This piece isn't considered a 'sculpture' compared to other works, but it is still art and has a 3D shape, so I consider it to be an interactive sculpture. This relates o my life because my mom makes quilts and she is always giving me her leftover fabric in hopes that I would want to make something, too. This was my first time making a quilt, so she had to teach me how first.

This piece is made from scraps I had in my fabric bin that looked nice to together, so it had several different types of fabric in it. The fuzzy blue is an old shirt that I wanted to keep but didn't fit, so I thought I would use it to make something else. The red flower patterned fabric is upholstery fabric that my mom used to make cushions. The white was fabric left over from one of my mom's quilts, and the same for the black fuzzy backing and the checkered fabric. I also used black and white thread, and batting in the middle of the quilt.

The process in making this quilt was as follows: I planned out the quilt design with the pieces I already had, cut them to size, cut more pieces, measured, pinned every piece together, and sewed them to make the face of the quilt. I also appliquéd two blocks like rhombuses onto the face. Then I pinned batting onto the back of the face, and the fuzzy black backing onto the front of the face. I sewed it on and left an opening, with which I flipped the quilt right-side out. Then I sewed the opening closed. This project evolved because I had two extra blue and red blocks and didn't really know what to do with them, until I thought of appliquéing them to the front of two checkered blocks. My next steps would be snipping of the extra thread that is sticking out.