Her Fanciful Quilts Catch Your Eyes

Brienne Brown of Barrington started making quilts when her friends started having babies.

“I have enjoyed sewing my whole life,” said Brown, but she didn’t start making quilts until about 23 years ago.

And her quilts are not your grandmother’s quilts.

“I am an art quilter,” Brown said. “I do whole-cloth quilts, not the traditional patch-work quilts. I do wall hangings, similar to paintings.”

Indeed, her silk and cotton fabric quilts contain original stitches that spawn trees and moons and insects and fish and plenty of monster-like characters.

“I’ve tried a lot of different things,” she said. “The monsters started with my daughter. I asked her what she wanted on her quilt. She said fish monsters. I went with that.”

Creating original designs is one of her favorite parts of quilt-making, she said.

“I try to make pleasing compositions that do not derive their harmony from repetitive symmetry,” she said. “I find much of my inspiration in nature, but do not feel constrained to make my work look realistic. I try to keep the whole composition pleasing, but I have the most fun with the details.”

Brown said she has no formal art training. In fact, she is a Princeton University-trained mathematician who worked for 19 years for the National Security Agency before moving to Barrington in 2005 with her husband, Rich Schwartz, a mathematics professor at Brown University, and her two daughters, Lucy, 14, and Lilly, 11.

Brown uses a typical home sewing machine to make her quilts. A room in her home is set aside for her work, but it sometimes spills out into other rooms as well.

“My quilting is all free-motion,” she said. “I lower the feed dogs and use my hands to move the fabric under the sewing needle. It is rather like drawing a picture by moving the paper instead of the pen.”

Brown said the stitching that holds the layers of fabric and batting between them together is spontaneity in action.

“I am tempted to put in small pictures that are best viewed from about eight inches away, the approximate distance from my eyes to the sewing needle,” she said.

Brown said she really likes to make fanciful insects, fish, birds, snakes and hands.

“Sometimes I loosen my control over the needle to let pictures grow organically, especially when I am quilting monsters,” she said. “I like to be surprised by the expressions on their faces.”

Brown just finished a September exhibit of her art quilts at the Barrington library. She is looking to exhibit elsewhere as well if you want to see her quilts up close.