Ta Da! Destination: Baum’s Oz
Getting this artwork to smile for its formal portrait was not easy. With the projection of a possible tropical storm–fingers crossed for only a storm, not a hurricane, all of us anxiously watched the live radar and the weather reports and tried hard not to remember the onslaught of heavy rains from Harvey and Imelda. While I grew up preparing for a blizzard in the Midwest, and we always knew to run to the basement for a tornado…it was easy to tell when that might happen–the temperatures plummeted and the sky became black and the wind howled. Enough of that though. Time to move on to the artwork.
Several pieces were presented at the meeting and the entire thing was captured on facebook live. It was an odd meeting with people scattered throughout the room with chairs separated into small groups. References to the movie were evident in most of the pieces. I wanted to create interest in reading the book.
I used bias tape to form the tornado; it was surprising how little fabric was required; the largest piece was about 10 inches square. In the Emerald City, everyone was required to wear green tinted glasses and so i put a pair in for each character. I decided Dorothy would wear cats-eye glasses and used fabric from my grandmother’s stash. The tin man would have slightly dented shiny (satin) lenses–a fabric from my mother’s stash of remnants from choir robes. I put in Toto, the wild forest and two smiling monkeys. And I used some small pieced Kansas Dugout block hand-pieced from bits and pieces of my mother’s, grandmother’s and my stash.
I quilted it twice in a swirling pattern to suggest the tornado slinging things out. All those circles were intended to be Munchkins but after some reflection, I thought they might look like dozens of Humpty-Dumpty’s and left it as it is.
It was a fun piece to make and I am looking forward to the next challenge.
Here are two details
Sylvia Weir Art 