World Traveller’s Blog

Arabian Tiles-Faces of Arabia

A Tile Layout in Scientific Center Kuwait

Arabian Tiles

Faces of Arabia was a challenge thrown by ‘ Birmingham  quilt festival’  in  the year 2007.

 I, as  usual  wanted to create an original piece.  Loaded with my camera ,   I went around Kuwait city looking for inspiration and stumbled in the ‘scientific center’ and the tile lay out inside the center and took a snap which was used  as a  design element to create a background  for  my quilt.

          Several photos taken during my travel around the middle east,  provided the images for line drawing  .  With my limited knowledge of techniques  then,I knew only a few techniques .  Out of them one was thread painting and the other was image transfer. I converted the photographs into line drawings and image transferred them using the bobbin thread  technique.

       To give more authenticity to thread painting I made the blocks in black as if to represent pencil sketching on a white fabric tile.

 Photographs from a Camel Race from Kuwait, A bust of Tutankhamen from Egypt  museum,Belly dancer from a show in Dubai, car race from desert safari, and a  small boy  in Arabic dress( actually a grandson of my friend in dress up) all were image transferred .The boarders were not quilted as  the basic machine I had then was not able to do it as it had tension problems.So   I avoided the quilting part as time was running out.

 The quilt went as part of the group quilts to Birmingham and displayed there.

Geared  with more techniques and tools I may reproduce my own  quilt  in the near future.