Its the Quilting
Wait, its a quilt, right? So what's "quilting"? In the jargon of quilt makers, quilting is the stitching that holds the whole thing together. It can be
really, really simple - bits of yarn tied at intervals, for example - or pretty goshdarned complex, like the background of this page.
Quilting is the part of the quilt that's magical to me. It's what turns a two-dimensional design into something three dimensional. It has the potential
to give a quilt a level of textural detail that shifts it from a flat surface to something verging on the sculptural. You can tell I'm nuts about this,
right? All these pretty pictures you've been looking at are only half the fun, as far as I'm concerned. You've got to get right up, nose to the fabric,
and see the quilting. Run your fingers over the surface, flip the darn thing over for petesake!
All of my quilting, as you will see, is done on a sewing machine, which allows for gorgeous, dense textural effects. The quilting is accomplished by
moving the entire quilt by hand while running the machine - kind of like drawing by moving the paper and holding the pen steady.
A Walk in the Woods
36x45

I use quilting in several distinct ways in my work. The first style of quilting you can see
on the background of this page. It follows the lines of the quilt, but with a little extra
added for fun. To the left you can see a picture of the front of the quilt.

$150
The second type of quilting crosses the lines of the pieced
design in some way to produce additional dramatic effects.
One example is using free-flowing quilting over geometric
shapes to "blur" the edges of the pieced design, as in the
quilt, to the left (front shown above back), September
Morning.
In another example, "Wish I May" shown to the right, the
quilting references the piecing directly - lines appear to
radiate out from the large, off-center star and interact
with the pieced chains of squares.
And then there's the really, really fun stuff! Quilting that creates
images separate from the piecing. This is most fun (for me) in bright
colors on black fabrics, but quilting also lends itself well to more
subtle elements, like this celtic knot work border (right):
A variation of this type of quilting exists in my portrait and animal
quilts: quilting that follows the shapes of the image (inside or out)
to create details, like the owl's eye here:
The quilt to the left, "Mind's Eye" (36x45) is probably my favorite example of
quilting used to create an image. The pieced design is a variation of that old
favorite, "tumbling blocks". The rest, the stylized buildings and archway, are
all created purely with machine quilting in a variegated rayon thread. This is,
essentially, a variation of the tradition of "whole cloth" quilts, where the
quilting was the whole of the design on plain fabric. I don't do plain very
well!  
The quilt to the left is pieced in a traditional "Chinese coins" pattern,
and the borders quilted in Chinese dragons. Now, once again I must beg
your forgiveness for my photography - I've edited the detail shots pretty
severely so that you can see the quilting, but the colors are shown more
clearly in the shot of the whole quilt. To the right you can see the dragon
winding around the column of pieced "coins" - there's a red dragon with
blue detail and a blue dragon with red detail, on either side of the quilt.
Just for fun, here's a negative image of the same quilting: