Chubby by Ildiko

Just as with previous challenges, I spent many hours contemplating what a good and suitable topic could be for me. The options really seemed endless – in fact half of the world would qualify themselves.

There came a point of time when all my ideas seemed to gravitate towards body image, body perception, towards women’s eternal quest for beauty. I reckon that has always been here with us, however the desire for perfection is now also served by rapid advances in chemical industry and amazing developments in cosmetic surgery. All these trends are further enhanced by the omnipresence of social media. We do not want to be more beautiful to please our families, friends or our immediate environment but …. the whole world! While there may be a trend of fostering body acceptance but consumerism tends to win over … and many women are likely to believe that if they tried this or that potion, if they had this or that ‘job’ done or if they did just x minutes of exercise daily … they will be as ‘perfect’ as the ideal they have been chasing.

My three Femina quilts were actually inspired by a photo I have recently seen of a friend’s grandkid. She is in a stage of life when you don’t yet care about your body, in fact don’t even know it exists. You are just happy to be fed and, as I found out from some medical studies, store fat for a ‘rainy day’. O what an age of innocence!

To make the quilt, first I dyed a range of pink shades. I put different kinds of cottons in the dye bath though later some were eliminated.

The posterised photo was then fused together and ironed on a piece of beautiful silk taffeta. As fusing generally creates a too flat surface, I added an extra layer of batting under the body.

Recently I am drawn to microscopic images, so it seemed appropriate

to find out what fat cells looked like.

It was easy to translate this into stitches: first I machine quilted smallish circles with three different shades of pink and then using two strands of embroidery floss I made hundreds of tiny ‘bows’ that together are reminiscent of the fibrous mesh in the image.

Rather than covering the whole quilt with the bows, I left a roughly oval area open – thus evoking a kind of photograph in a frame.

Dimensions: 80 x 49 cm