It gives us immense pleasure & honour to do so and with utmost pride are privileged to post the 1st Entry for the Husqvarna Viking India - Quilt Competition 2014 : As quoted by Alana Savant, Pune : MY QUILT STORY: Greetings ! My name is Alana Savant, a textile designer by profession and a novice quilter. India is known the world over for its beautiful fabrics. I have attempted to work with these beautiful colours, textures, prints and weaves to tell the story. INSPIRATION : In India, where we worship numerous goddesses, we also look down upon fairer mortals - a daughter, a sister, a wife and above all a mother.....who live a life which is naturally so beautiful, often breaks into ‘fragments’ when they are subjected to the cruelty of misguided elements. I have dedicated my quilted wall piece to these Indian women and call it ‘Nirbhaya’ – which means fearless. THE QUILT JOURNEY: It was by chance that I was exposed to sewing and quilting. I met a Confetti hand quilter who exposed me to this creative avenue through her beautiful work, further on she told me of a workshop in 2012 on sewing / quilting. I participated and won a sewing machine - (still wonder how?) ! On an impulse, I upgraded the machine to a Computerised Sewing Machine of the same brand. Got trained and could hardly work on the machine when we had to move to a new city. My neatly packed machine stayed the same for a long time; till we moved into a house. A few months later, when this competition was announced, I was still in two minds. One said that ‘don’t’ as I could not even sew straight, the second said ‘why not’ as this can be a good opportunity to ‘begin’. Well? I listened to the later. I choose to work on a wall hanging of 36” x 36”. The Roller coaster ride began.....lots of ups and down, trials and errors. Watched the You Tube tutorials, they were indeed a great help, thanks to them, it has indeed been a great learning experience – both, with the quilting / stitching techniques, as well as my new computerised sewing machine. So were the CD and the manuals of the machine. It was a struggle, not only with the quilting / stitching, but with how I wanted the piece to look. Finding the right fabrics, threads was a tough task. Frequent visits to different markets were crazy. The seam ripper was starting to become my best pal, till I decided to shrug it off. The dining table and floor became the work space. Bought some equipment like the self healing mat, the rotary cutter and the measure scale, etc. Experimented with stitches and threads. Was much hassled many times, but did not give in. The puckering became an element of design adding a textured element to the piece. The journey of this creation has the valued contribution of loving friends whose constant encouragement gave me the inspiration to bring it to its conclusion. Looking back.....I am glad I participated. I feel happy and thrilled to have overcome so many hurdles (lots more to overcome). Indeed, IF YOU CAN SEE IT IN YOUR MIND, YOU CAN TRANSLATE IT WITH FABRICS. It is a challenging outlet of creative expression which I am seriously getting into. Proud to become a QUILTER. The size of the quilted wall hanging is 36” x 36”.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 05:14:03 +0000
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