When the clutter prevented her from opening the door to her son's
bedroom, Laura Wasilowski decided to do something about it. So, she
created a quilt.
Titled "Gus Cleans His Room," the whimsical wall quilt features a
giant vacuum outside the bedroom window sucking everything out of the
room.
Wasilowski says her work is unique because there is a story behind
the illustrations she incorporates into each of her quilts and the
stories are usually funny.
"I have a quirky mind," she said. "I live in a funny family. I'm
surrounded by comedians: my husband, son and daughter. This is how I
stand out from the rest of the family, by expressing my humor."
Wasilowski creates the pictorial art quilts by fusing appliques
onto the fabric with an iron and then quilting it on the machine. She
teaches quilting and creates colorful hand-dyed fabrics and threads
available for sale through her business, ARTFABRIK, on her website. A
resident of Elgin, Ill., she travels around the country sharing her
expertise with members of quilt-making organizations.
She will give a talk at the Glendale Quilt Guild's meeting tonight
and conduct a daylong workshop Saturday at the Glendale Central
Library.
In her talk tonight, "I Quilt, Therefore, I Am," she will show
different pieces of her artwork.
To keep her audience awake, she intersperses her talk with singing
parodies of folk songs, she said. Like in the song, "If I Had a
Hammer," she changes the words to "If I Had an Iron."
"I like to make people laugh," she said. "It gives them a break
from the horrible things going on in the world. And, I'm addicted to
whimsy and goofiness."
At Saturday's workshop, her subject will be "Nine-Patch Polka."
"She will take the nine-patch traditional quilt block and
demonstrate her fusing techniques," said Ruth Berkey, president of
the Glendale Quilt Guild.
It's a technique for making an abstract fused art quilt,
Wasilowski said. The appliques are applied to fabric by a fusible web
activated by the heat of an iron.
She compared it to cutting shapes out a piece of paper, which
gives you the flexibility to create organic shapes, like circles,
flowers, chairs and T-shirts flying out of a bedroom window.
"The glue on the webbing is so strong, it holds all the shapes in
place," she said. "Stitching is another way to add a decorative
feature to the quilt, but in my case, the stitching is not
necessary."
Marilyn Green of Burbank, the vice president of the guild, said
Wasilowski's technique would help people who like to create their own
