Since the late 80s 3D forms were increasingly being entered in art quilt calls, and a few years ago SAQA expanded it’s mission concept and statement, adding 3D quilted objects to its former focus, the fairly modern artform of wall quilts that descended from historic traditional quilts. SAQA now accomodates quilting techniques and materials in a wide range of soft sculptures and fibreart. SAQA then started up a 3D Special Interest Group, which I joined…as it focuses on those quilted objects outside the two dimensional wall quilts that have always been the backbone of the Studio Art Quilt Associates organisation.
In the last 45+ years, long before I began making art quilts, I occasionally produced 3D works, and when I surveyed them all to organise a powerpoint talk on my 3D art, I was a little surprised there were so many.
Today on Instragram I visited a textile artist I follow, Victoria Gertenbach who does lots of 3D elements and small items like embroidered fabric beads, mats and vessels. In that link are two small vessels she posted last year (2025) showing me enough to work out how she probably makes them. They’re small, and she commented that the left, yellow one, was still a bit floppy but would stiffen up with more stitching. She doesn’t give dimensions for her works so I’m not sure, but this newer one posted earlier this year could be larger, and I feel she probably added stiffening during construction. Milliners’ stiffening and lightweight canvas would both work here, and the product called fosshape that SAQA’s in N.America and probably Europe – maybe everywhere except LATAM – all adore working with! But anyway, I have a heap of old Xray photos that will be great. They’re easy to sew through by hand or machine, and for something fairly large I’d machine two of them together to form one (stronger) sheet.
As you can imagine, bowl, basket, box and vase vessels are popular constructions in this group, the other main application being bas relief 3D elements attached to 2D wall quilts, which is what I’ve mostly used. However in addition to those, down the years I’ve also made some soft sculptures, like my all-time triumph, a soft sculpture of the historic Golden Eagle nugget – gold nugget soft scuplture, and the embellished stuffed Suffok Puffs appearing in my current Growth series. I went through a phase of fabric covered bowls too, in the late 1990s…
… and a couple of fabric covered boxes in 1986-7 of which I don’t have pics, but I also experimented in 2021 (pandemic) with box-shapes to form a shadow box kind of presentation for stitchery- and maybe I should revisit that idea.
