Turid Tonnessen is Norvegian. She won the Aurifil prize at the 2008 international European Patchwork Meeting contest: 1 suitcase with 216 Aurifil cotton threads. Very excited, she decided to use some of these threads immediately and we thank her for sharing her secrets with us!
Since ages, I am basically a textile-printer, it is fun to find a way to combine my quilt-passion from later years with my devotion to printing from earlier years. 2 years ago I had my own exhibition in my hometown Fredrikstad with 22 pieces. Since then dying, printing and quilting has been my way of doing my textile work. It is hard to find an environment where to develop the combination of quilting and printing. But luckily I have a soul mate living in the same town as me – Bente Vold Klausen. And since I am committed to cloth I 
have now started on a programme with Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan at C2C. www.committedtocloth.com
Meeting point.
To make this work, I started as usual with a home-dyed piece of cotton ( picture 1). When I start to work, the piece of fabric I choose tells me what I’ll use for further colours and materials. This fabric was light and colourful
I decided on some gold in points that did not dominate the patterns of colour in the material. Then I thought of some appliqué symbols, maybe in greyish organza (picture 2). Here you can also see some dotted pattern-mat which I wanted to use for the golden circles. The circles I wanted to print were cut out in freeze-paper. Then they were ironed on to the fabric. The golden dots were printed within these circles.
I then realized that grey was not the right colour for my further marks, and switched to a sharp blue. Some blue organza was glued with vlieseline (picture 3).
The symbol for meeting-point was cut out and ironed on the fabric. When ironing vliseline it is vital to remember extra ironing cloth. The next step then was to make a sandwich, and the work is ready for quilting (picture 4).
I quilt my work rather heavily. But in this work I left the golden rounds un-quilted. This makes the golden circles to be a little bit “puffy” amongst the heavy quilted background – rather fun for a change! The Aurifil no 50 is perfect for the organza, while the no. 40 is excellent for the cotton. To take care of the colourful pattern, the various sections are quilted in shades of the same colour. Aurifil colours went so well with the Procion colour I use for my dying! The quilt-lines are not fancy, just enough to add some life to the surface (picture 5).
