Poe Challenge

Edgar Allen Poe's Birthday Post Card: The Voices in His Head

A challenge went out on the Quilt Art list to make a post card to celebrate Poe's Birthday in January. Poe's work is so fraught with his own mental struggles, I wanted to try and capture some sense of the Raven as Poe's dark familiar. I really had fun with Poe's face. I've never stitched faces in quilts before, so finding a technique to try to make it look like Poe was a challenge. In an adaptation of a technique I read about in Quilting Arts magazine a few month ago, I transferred my drawing to tracing paper and laid the tracing paper down and stitched the outlines of his facial features in black. I removed the paper with tweezers and then added detail. I like how this technique worked out. I'm not sure it will work for the other two quilts with faces that I'm working on, but at least it worked on this one. The letters were outlined and filled in with thread painting, and the background quilting is a line from the poem, "And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting."