Pixeladies’ Student Art: Alison Becker & Masks

Recently a former student, Alison Becker of Berkeley, California USA, sent us the following email about her quilt on masks:

Hi Deb and Kris,
I have taken your Photoshop classes a couple of times and want to thank you so much for your inspiration…. I have been making masks for family and friends since the beginning of the pandemic.
As many other quilters did, I used my stash. I asked everyone that I made masks for to send me a picture. So – now I am making a quilt from all those wonderful photos. As you see – I kept the masks and certain objects in color, and turned everything else black and white. The sashing is made from fabrics that I used for masks – in fact I tried to place the fabric near the photo of the mask using the same fabric.

Alison’s Masks

Alison reports she made over 500 masks, including one big batch for a kindergarten class because it was hard to find good masks for little kids.

Alison’s Quilt

Alison asked us to use this detail image. It has her and her husband in the middle square, family in some other squares, her youngest mask wearer (granddaughter, age 6) and in the purple sweater, Althea, who is 100.

And There’s More

Alison isn’t finished with the quilt; she’s going to add embroidery to the photos on the quilt, like she did on these smaller pieces.

We are so proud of Alison and all the work she did making masks and then documenting the mask recipients. What a beautiful tribute to such a sad time–2020 and the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. Alison also chronicled this period with photographs and writing in a piece entitled How I Survived Covid through Quilting.

If you are interested in viewing more student art, check out our blog post on Chris Beardsley’s work. We hope to showcase more student art in the future. If you have projects inspired by one of our classes, we’d love to feature your work. If you’d like to learn more about our Photoshop Elements classes, visit https://www.pixeladies.com/classes/.  You can send us a message, and we’ll notify you when we teach next (probably not until after August—we need to get together and make some art for ourselves).