I recently participated in a tiny art show contest. Which I had to turn into a quilt show. My original idea was to have a barn quilt show at the barn where I take all my finished photos. I stayed up way too late one night and sketched out and painted 1.5″ quilt blocks. I used watercolor paper and watercolor pencils.
The next morning I decided that they needed “frames.” I used black construction paper for the frames and I even used plain white paper to add mats to several of the tiny paintings. Now that I was off the track of pure barn quilts, I decided that my show needed some actual quilts. Or, actual mini pretend quilts. However you look at it, the show needed some stitches.
I used cuts of fabric in the 2″-3″ range that looked like quilts so that I would not have to do any piecing. I determined my sizes based on the viewers (robots) who would later be attending the art and quilt show. Some of the quilts are modern and some are more traditional. I backed my single cut of fabric with wool felt and quilted using straight lines. I did get a bit carried away and changed my thread colors about a million times more than necessary for quilting 5 miniature quilts.
Once the quilts were done, I needed some signage for my show. I went with “Quaranteeny” the name provided by @tinyartshow for the competition that inspired my tiny show.
And just for the fun of it, I added a pennant banner at the last minute to bring a little more color and cheer to the entire show.
First, I set up the show at the barn to take photos. This proved challenging because the sun was fully overhead and my assistants are under the age of 8. But we managed to get some photos of what I’m calling the “country fair” show.
When we came back to the house (from the public barn across the street – we did not break any social distancing protocols) I decided to set up the show on our front steps. We get quite a bit of foot traffic these days as people go on walks in the neighborhood.
I’m calling this version the “urban” setting. I even made a sign from sidewalk chalk to draw attention to my tiny show. It was fun to listen to people stop and talk about it while they were passing by on walks.
Here are some detailed photos of the pieces that hung in the show. There were 5 quilts and 9 paintings, plus the signs. This was probably the most enjoyable activity I have worked on since starting this stay home stuff over a month ago. Hopefully the photos can bring a little joy to you too.
