Femina 3 Flabby by Ildiko

As I mentioned a few months ago, I will deal with the female body, more specifically legs.

My first Femina quilt showed the chubby legs of a baby, a period when women don't at all consider what their body looks like, and even less of what the society considers beautiful. They just exist: ignorantly amassing fat. Femina 2 presenting the legs of a young adult woman confirmed to the society's expectation to work out, to exercise, to have a nice shape of your legs.

The third quilt intends to show what female legs look like when both the fat and the muscles begin to diminish dramatically. The pattern is actually a combination of two photos: my legs with someone else's knees (mine still look a bit "better").

The choice of purple was quite obvious. On the one hand, it fits nicely with the pink of No. 1. and the red of No. 2. But I also thought of the famous poem "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple". Concerning materials and techniques, I continued to use fused cotton applique on silk, and a combination of machine quilting and hand stitching. This time the silk is a quite textured dupione, in contrast with the smooth shiny pink taffeta and the flat matte red georgette.

For the quilting plus embroidery pattern I selected a microscopic image of dead cells on the skin surface. I used thick variegated purple thread to stitch a scallop-like pattern and then added hundreds of French knots with different shades of purple embroidery floss.

The dimensions are 80 by 50 cm.