Birds of a Different Color

This is one of a series of quilts about birds as symbols of freedom and the joy if life. In this quilt the birds are very abstract, and function as graphic design elements. The forms are intentionally ambiguous, so that each viewer can use her/his own experience with birds to guess their species. Even the number of birds in the quilt is subject to interpretation.

The colors represent the spectral colors of refracted light The darker values of red and purple begin at the bottom of the quilt, and graduate through orange and yellow in the center to blue and green at the top.

The machine quilting was done with over 100 different colors of Madeira Poly-Neon thread. In the feathers of the birds the quilting is reminiscent of the traditional "Feathered Plume" quilting pattern.

On the back of the quilt is a single piece of cotton fabric, hand painted in a rainbow of colors, echoing the colors of the birds on the front of the quilt.

At the AQS show in 2000 (where this quilt won best of show), the most frequently asked question was "How long did it take?" This is not a simple question to answer. It took approximately two weeks (8-16 hours per day) to do the machine quilting. It took approximately four weeks, full time, to piece it. It took approximately one week to draw the design, and ten years to figure out how to draw the design. Learning to make the quilt in this amount of time took twenty years of practice.