Happy birthday to me!

My birthday was last week while I was away, and look what I got from the Mother! I've already posted some of her great quilts, and she's showing off once again with these fabric versions of Charles Harper prints. Harper did some great midcentury illustration, especially of birds. When the Mother saw them in a book I have, she thought they'd be great reinterpreted in fabric. These are the first ones, based on these prints:



The Mother dug through her stash to find the fabrics and then snipped them into shapes, which were then fused to the background fabric. The details are in pen ink. The print fabrics are a nod to the textures of Harper's prints but also lend an extra depth—the Mother searched high and low to find a scrap that replicated the warbler's shaded breast. Then she stretched the fabric around canvases.

I love them both, but my favorite of the two is the top one. It's always been one of my favorite Harper birds, and there's an extra mixed-media quality to it with the bleach splotches. I'll try to get them hung up this weekend so I can gaze at them all the time. They're be the thing that people comment on whenever they're introduced to my apartment. Is the Mother fantastic, or what? What she can do with textiles always amazes me.

As if that wasn't enough, the package also had a copy of EQ5, which is software for designing quilts. I've been playing with it for a few days to figure it out, and I'm quite excited. Modern quilts with irregular blocks are a little trickier to do than traditional grid patterns, but I'll get there (hell, I managed QuarkXPress). I've been sketching quilt ideas in a book of grid paper, but as a child of the digital age, I can't properly play with designs unless they're on the screen.

And that's still not all—the Mother also stuck in a bunch of fabric. She knew I was planning a quilt with lots of text prints, and she thought the dots would look good with my Plain Spoken quilt. Perhaps in some pillows?

So as I'm sure this blog makes apparent, I have lovely parents. Thanks Mother!