Improv fun!

I dip in and out of collage as a quilt making techinque and I am always surprised that there are so many different ways to collage a textile piece.  

Improv piece of the fastnet rock lighthouse using fabrics other then cotton.

Making Waves using bondaweb and raw edge, I entered this into an Irish Patchwork Society exhibition, inspired by the Great Wave by Hokusai.

Using up scraps from a Laura Heine collage workshop to make Jupiter!

Whimsical fun using scraps and big stitch embroidery in the style of Laura Wasilowski.

So when the theme of collage popped up I thought : Yes!  I've got this... and then I thought what can I make that's not the same as all of the above?  I got stuck! 

Then, the opportunity came to sign up for a collage portrait class, with Paula Rafferty, at the River of Dreams annual exhibiton in Limerick and I jumped at the chance.  We made a portrait of Dolores O'Riordan from the Cranberries, also from Limerick, and I had the opportunity so many times to hear her sing and the band play as I was growing up, when they were starting our on their amazing music journey.

 

In the end though, I ended up going back to improv and having a play.  One of my favourite places on the West coast of Ireland, about an hours drive away, is Kilkee.  It has a horseshoe bay and two cliff walks on either side of the beach.  Maybe this colourful, cartoonish, childlike collage is my go to.  I don't know, but I had a lot of fun playing with shape and colour and straightline quilted it to put in a frame.

 

I think I might change or add to the car pulling the boat, thats a tiny bit too basic I think.  I really like the houses falling away on the frame and I think this could be fun to make bigger and add more detail, like the steps going down to the beach and some boats in the sea.  Otherwise, I quite like its happy maddness, and it was very much a happy way to spend a rainy afternoon playing with scraps!