An Amazing Three-Dimensional Art Quilt

Quilter’s Name: Heidi Zielinski from Stevensville, Montana

Style of Quilt: Art Quilt

Title of Project: “A Montana Blue Ribbon”

Featured Date: Week of 11-30-22

Hold onto your hats because this quilt is going to blow you away!  This week’s featured Quilt & Tell submission comes to us all the way from beautiful Montana. Please meet Heidi Zielinski…

Hi, my name is Heidi Zielinski and I create art quilts to share and sell under the name Fiber Into Art by Heidi. I have been making them since about 2007. I was recently featured on the new series (2900) of Quilting Arts TV and I am in the winter 2023 issue of Quilting Arts Magazine coming out in December 2022. I create in my home studio and show regionally in galleries, as well as sending work to national juried quilt shows and occasionally teaching. 

These pictures are of an art quilt I recently made called “A Montana Blue Ribbon,” which is 15”w x 18”h.  It is inspired by our many beautiful blue ribbon trout streams in Montana. I grew up in western Montana and currently live in Stevensville, a small town in the Bitterroot Valley surrounded by mountains with a river running through it.

This quilt has dimensional elements that stand out from the quilt surface. The vertical strips, representing underwater features and obstacles, have wire inside so they can bend and allow the fish to swim through them. The fish themselves are all from one commercial fabric and have layers of aluminum foil between the fabric and batting so they can “swim” and maintain their fishy poses. The other fabrics are all ones that I ice-dyed or overdyed, including cheesecloth. The background is a collage of dyed fabrics and is heavily free-motion machine-quilted and hand-embroidered. 

This quilt was made for a show that my local art group, the Montana Bricolage Artists (MBA), currently has on display in a local gallery called “Out of the Box.”  All of the art quilts in the show diverge from the usual square/rectangular traditional quilt form in some way. 

The edge of the quilt is finished with several textural yarns twisted together and secured to the edge with a wide zigzag stitch on my machine, and of course has a sleeve and rod on the back for hanging along with my quilt label. Because of the dimensional aspects of this quilt, I probably will not be able to enter it in any national quilt or art shows, so I thought I would share it here! 

This was a really fun piece to create and I’m very happy with the results! I hope you enjoy it! 

You can follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/heidizielinski.fiberart or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/fiber_into_art.

Thank you,

Heidi Zielinski

Fiber Into Art by Heidi