Have You Heard? The World is Love - A Collaborative Art Quilt

"Have You Heard? The World is Love," 15" x 15" by Pam Geisel & and Vicki Conley, Winter/Spring 2020 

Back at the beginning of the year I saw a post from a woman who creates art under the name DuchessFrouFrou, who created a group called CoLaborArt Quilts and was organizing a collaborative quilt project for this year. She picks a theme, sends hand-dyed fabric to each participant, coordinates who the second artist is. Each participant starts one project but finishes a different one. The final size of all of the quilts are 15" x 15" and they are sent to her to arrange to have them exhibited together.

The photo at the top of the post is the finished piece, which I started. This photo is the part that I did. I got two pieces of hand-dyed fabric and they were both pink. One was a hot pink that had light pink dots on it and the other had parts that were pale and other parts that were almost purple.

The theme was "Sacred" and after some thought, I decided that the earth is sacred but since the fabric was pink I decided to make the earth in the shape of a heart. This was back in February, so I could have also been influenced by Valentine's Day. I intentionally didn't make the heart shape very distinct in case the second artist wanted to go another direction.

I fused the continent shapes to the background and sewed around the raw edges. Because the background was a pale pink I used pieces of the fabric to make the shape of the heart by "blending" random shapes of fabric from light to dark. These are fused but I didn't sew them down since I usually do that during the quilting process and someone else was going to do the quilting.

I did get to name the piece and I used a Beatle's song title with a slight change. The song is "Have You Heard? The Word is Love." My title is "Have You Heard? The World is Love." I think the Beatles would be OK with that interpretation.

You can read about the piece that I finished here.