I have been working on this painting for four weeks. Not steadily of course, but it is the only thing that I have been painting. I still see things that I should touch up, but sometimes you just have to say that it is enough and not fiddle with it anymore.

The working title for this painting is Mother and Child, but I would like to find something less obvious to title it. If anyone has an idea what to call it please put it in the comments!

The painting is acrylic on stretched canvas and measures 16×20 inches.

I have started a new, little one of flowers, iris, as a sort of rest from the big painting. It is something that I am not so emotionally wrapped up in. Then I am going to do another large painting of a woman and a dog.

Quilting

I am still looking at the antique and vintage quilts in the local museum, the Lynde House Museum in Whitby, Ontario, Canada. We have several of the most basic type of patchwork quilts, the Hit and Miss design. Some of these were made with homespun fabric and are 150 to 175 years old. I talked about them in my last post.

One of the popular quilt patterns in North America in the last quarter of the 1800s was the crazy quilt. It was made by sewing odd shaped scrapes of material on a foundation cloth in what appeared to be a random pattern. Most were decorated with embroidery along the seams and embroidered and sometimes painted motifs on the fabric scraps.

The picture on the left is one of the crazy quilts in the Museum’s collection. The one on the right shows the varied types and themes of the embroidery.

The detail on the left shows the inclusion of lace in the quilt. On the right you can see a popular motif, a horseshoe for good luck.  You can really see the beauty and variety of the stitching on the seams and patches.

A quilt like this was a work of art that could take months to create. It would not have been used to sleep under but as a “Best” quilt to show off on a made bed.