Welcome to Mountaintop Quilting Studio

This is where you find me exploring a variety of creative adventures mostly about but not limited to quilting. I'm a firm believer that one increases their creativity by being open to and playing with a variety of cretative endeavors ... at least that my excuse for today. Enjoy your sourjourn through my studio playroom. May you find encouragement and inspiration, and on occassion, a little pin-prick that may be thought-provoking or spark your imagination. Thank you for stopping by.

 JOURNAL QUILT GROUP MARCH 2009: Our prompt was the word "dance" and our challenge was to use printing on fabric in some way  in the block or challenge fabric. And thus began my journey exploring and experimenting with techniques. I knew what I wanted to do; I knew what I wanted my journal quilt to look like; the question was how to achieve the desired effect.

My first thought upon hearing the word "dance" was not your traditional sock-hop kind of memories. My husband always played in the dance band so there isn't a lot of memories of special dancing dates.

What did come to mind was my father's fascination with honey bees and the dance they do to communicate with the rest of the hive as to the location of the nearest pollen plot. The research began and I learned ...

• I learned the name of the Honey Bee Dance: THE WAGGLE DANCE
• I learned about the research scientists actually did to prove bees really do perform and communicate with the waggle dance. It sounds almost like sci-fi kind of stuff but the article had actual photos of little radar tracking devices attached to robot bees. The scientists even tried to fool the real bees by switching directions on them to see if they could send them a different way.
• I learned all about honey bee festivals held world wide and found examples of beautiful inspiring art work - posters, paintings, and books written about how bees and people are very much alike.

When I saw the rough sketch mapping the dance I knew there had to be a way to transfer the image to fabric. I knew I wanted to do something with English Paper Piecing and hexagons. And I began collecting buttons and patches that might work for embellishing.  Two things left: figuring out how to get the image printed on the fabric and how to quilt the little piece.

And then life happened ...

You may have noticed the original challenge date - almost a year and a half ago, but now I'm back on track and am ready to do the finishing handwork. Stayed tuned for a photo of a finished product soon. In the meantime, you can read about how I did the image transfer HERE.

Comments

• Kay Did you see the honeycomb design on Quilting Arts site? Not as good as yours but interesting! Of course I might lean towards all the honeycomb flowers we have made as being the best. Ann
  by E. Ann Beeman on 30 October 2010 at 11:23 a.m.