Lisa Call and Melody Johnson discuss preferences for Quilting a Quilt Top

To Quilt or Not To Quilt

Lisa Call's Lines #25, 3"x3", ©2009

Sometimes a piece of hand dyed fabric is just too beautiful to cut up for an art quilt. Likewise, there are times when I know that visible quilting lines will not enhance, and in fact will detract from the effect I want for my finished art quilt.

To gain some insight on such challenging artistic decisions, I searched out the opinions of 2 noted art quilt makers on this subject, Lisa Call and Melody Johnson. How much and what type of quilting do they prefer for their work?

Melody Johnson"s October Gift, quilting appears hidden

Right away, I discovered that art quilter Melody Johnson has mixed emotions on the subject of adding quilt lines to hold her work together once she has completed the top. After all, a quilt is usually a sandwich of a top, a filler and a back. If she were free of the need to earn money, and if she could work and create quilts exactly as she wished to, she wouldn’t be doing much quilting at all, Melody says in a spirited blog conversation. But the economic necessities of maintaining her career path require that she must sell quilts, and her clients expect a quilt to be actually quilted. She is not very fond of the final step in making a quilt, sewing the quilt layers together.

In a very blunt yet totally consistent blog post, noted fabric painter Lisa Call wrote, “As I told Melody, if you don’t want to quilt the thing, then don’t! But scribbling all over the top with some fancy stitches showing off skill in free motion quilting isn’t going to make it a better piece of art. Fully integrated and thoughtful quilting that enhances and supports the quilt is what is needed.”

Lisa continues, “Basically my thoughts are that many a quilter ruins a nice piece of artwork by scribbling all over the top of their quilt because they haven’t any ideas on how to quilt the thing, yet they feel obligated to quilt it. So they make all these fancy free motion quilting patterns all over a really sophisticated design. I think it looks out of place to do this unless the quilting patterns some how tell the same story that the composition is telling.”

Lisa Call sews very dense quilting lines on her fabric paintings. She works almost exclusively with her hand dyed cotton cloth, typically in geometric constructions. The choice of colored thread for the quilting lines is extremely important to Lisa. Significant texture is created by the action of the sewing machine making sewn stitches, and, as I see it, the thread colors she selects match the fabric colors exactly.

These two internationally celebrated art quilters have stated their positions very clearly. Many other notable art quilters are recognized as masters in their particular area of expertise, both in quilt composition and execution. Caryl Bryer Fallert free motion quilts more extensively than probably any other art quilter. Using Lisa’s words, Caryl fully integrates and thoughtfully quilts her artwork to achieve an even richer visual experience.

close up, Caryl Bryer Fallert's Giraffes in the Paintbox 2

Caryl's In the Marsh, close up

Here are some examples of quilted art work where the quilting lines do tell the same story as the composition is telling.

Check the hand quilting by Kris Doyle commissioned for a quilt designed and sewn by Nancy Crow, effective free motion machine quilting by Juanita Yeager and one of my own pieces

Firefly Reef, close up, hand quilted by Gina Delorenzi

where I blended both hand and machine quilting to enhance the direction that quilt was going.

Iris panel by Juanita Yeager

See how Anne Nickolson attaches her quilts together by appliqueing through all layers.

Anne Nickolson's, Woman Still Seated

Nancy Crow's Bow Tie #4

Isn’t it great that we have not only artistic freedom, an amazing breadth of materials to choose from, and growing collector awareness of the art quilt movement. Our art quilts dazzle because we are committed artists, dedicated to promoting excellence in the field of art quilts.