Karen Rips quilt in TCQC 02-22-15

I became friends with Karen Rips soon after the International 12X12 group started.  It has been a pleasure to watch her style develop and I am a great admirer of her very elegant, subtle quilts.  The only trouble with this quilt is my inability to photograph it to show it at its best. The light color is a soft sage green, surrounding the dark sage green center rectangle  and the outer edges are a deep purple, as is the faced back.  Karen has used her unique technique of sewing the front, batting, backing together with channel quilting and then doing a sort of felting process using hot water to make everything shrink up. 

 

"Gravida"  Karen Rips - Thousand Oaks, CA  2013  35"W x 46"L

Hand-dyed cotton, wool batting, hand embroidery, paint, silk, machine pieced and quilted.

[Gravida (noun)  a woman's status regarding pregnancy; usually followed by a roman numeral designating the number of times the woman has been pregnant.]

There are many areas of embroidery stitches. The black lines are paint.

 

Karen has also used some strips of frayed silk fabric to embellish the quilt.

More of the silk strips and black paint along with hand embroidery.

Here are multiple rows of straight hand stitches done in variegated purple/pink thread.

If you enlarge this image you might see the bearding of the wool batting.  I like it as it gives even more texture to this very textured quilt which is very soft and pliable - more like a hand quilted work.

I faded out this image so you can see the facing with the curved inner edges.

This is the third of the pieces of silk couched down with embroidery stitches.

An  adequate label which gives two ways of contacting the artist, her name, the date and even the size of the quilt in the lower right hand corner.