Taken By Storm

This small collage started out as an exercise of the technique in Ilze Aviks week long workshop at Arrowmont in 2000.

"Taken by Storm" - 10"x13" - 2000
Materials: Hand painted silk, silk, rayon fabrics, threads

It all began with a piece of silk I had painted earlier in the week. I had taken a bag of "orts" (British term for scraps/leftovers) and silk fabric samples to the workshop. The black stripey fabric pieces are trimmings from a tunic I had "created" the fabric for. Silk chiffon samples were layered between an outer layer of rayon fabric and a silk lining ... then all were channel stitched together ... then just the top layer was sliced through.


All the fabric pieces are the shape and size as they came out of the ort bag. The silk squares were cut to their sizes. Then the threads were pulled out and arranged. I was just going for a interesting compostion. It wasn't until hand-quilting the piece that I became aware of the tornado.

The hand-painted piece of silk on the back got wrapped around to form the borders on the front.

"Taken By Storm" hangs in Memphis, Tennessee.