Caterpillars/Butterflies

Caterpillars/Butterflies

64" x 62"

Whoot hoo!  Finally finished with this one! 

Caterpillar side:

Butterfly side:

This quilt for me is all about the similarities and differences between the four panels.  They each have things in common with each other, but also differences.  And, from my previous post... I love the way the tops of the butterfly panels flow together in a continuous arc.  It is a metaphor for the differences in individuals and yet they all belong to the same family or community. It is a feeling of belonging, like a safety net, or a protective arc, like an umbrella, helping us weather the storm.

You may notice that the white fabric on the back looks a bit less than white? Each panel has a slight color cast because there are so very many threads of different colors used for the quilting.

Quilting:

Even though I pin basted the quilt, I wanted absolutely no shifting between the layers.  I started in the middle and worked my way out by removing the pins, and replacing with hand basting every 2 inches or so.  Then I filled in with some machine quilting.  Then I went back in for the close spaced machine quilted lines.

You can see the front (the green and orange), with the rolled up section of the back (the blue butterfly).

The caterpillar side of the blue panel with all the quilting lines going through the tiny pieced "humps".

The same section of the quilt from the butterfly side showing the quilting lines and thread colors

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Quilt Textures:

You may remember from the previous post, my concerns about doing this matchstick densely spaced quilting over all the tiny pieces sections with lots of seam bulk? Well, I opted to put in the carefully trimmed batting.  In some sections, I even put in the extra batting just to add another element of texture design.  It is kind of cool how the circles show up on the other side, just from the extra individual circles of batting that are inside the quilt, and how they allude to the design on the opposite side of the quilt.

This side is the caterpillar side.  I inserted a circle of batting under the white circle.

This is the butterfly side of the same panel.  Can you see the evidence of the extra circle shaped batting?

It is a subtle effect but really quite interesting!

Two-sided binding:

The very top photos show the quilt photographed on a grey back board.  If you look closely, you can see that the binding does not distract from the design.  I pieced it to match the different colored sections, and I made it two-sided.  That way, it could be white on one side of the quilt, and black on the other.  This required a "knife-edge" binding, which was not at all easy.

Also, on the butterfly side of the quilt, I tried to match the black binding to the section of the wings that were going off the edge of the quilt.  I made a design decision to just use a solid black, even though there were more colors on the edge. 

Hanging tube:

The quilt was so heavily quilted, that a simple white tube (the same color as the background fabric), would have stuck out and not blended in. I made the painstaking decision to top stitch the tube with all the same colors.  Yeah, I did that!

One color at a time, I went down the tube and traced where it should go. This is the mostly empty sleeve on top of the back of the quilt.

Nearly there, I am almost finished with this blue section and ready to move on to the warmer section on the right.

Here is the tube sewn with a tuck and pinned to the back.

The photo of the butterfly side of the quilt at the top has the hanging sleeve already sewn on it.  Can't see it? Yep, that was the point!  Success!!!

Quilting over seam allowances

Quilting over seam allowances

My most recent finish was a two-sided quilt, and the front side has some tiny piecing on it, which makes for some hefty seam allowance bulk for my consideration. Just recently I heard about hump jumpers. (You can google it to find places to buy one or see youtube videos on how to use them.)

Perhaps you have experienced the really bad tension problems that result from sewing over a bulky seam? The reason for the biggish loops of thread that appear on the back side is that your walking foot is not level while sewing over them. As it approaches the thick stack of seam allowances, the front of the foot tilts up. As you sew over and exit the thick stack, the front of the foot tilts down.  I don't know why that should matter, but it does. The hump jumper is meant to place under your sewing machine foot, first in the back, then take a few stitches, and then move it to the front....all in an effort to keep your sewing machine foot level while going over the changes in thickness. This sounds fine and reasonable to me, with the exception that there are just so many changes in thickness as I sew across a section of tiny piecing. It would require so many stops and moving of that hump jumper, that I would NEVER make it across an entire seam, much less hundreds of lines of stitching. 

My quilt required great precision on both sides though, because it is two-sided, so I had to do solve the dilemma. That's when my mind thought up this crazy scheme. I tried it out on a practice sample first.

I decided to use batting as a way to build up an extra layer of thickness near the bulkiest seams, in an effort to keep the walking foot slightly more level as it goes over. I put a piece of batting on the back side of the sections with tiny piecing. Then I cut a circle around the most extensive bulky seams, for each seam. 

I pinned the Swiss cheese looking batting in place (which will be basted if I decide to use this technique). Then I added a second layer of a full batting, and then sandwiched the entire thing together with top, the two batting layers and the back, held by more pins. 

Then I went crazy with the matchstick quilting. 

For convenience, I opted for one color of thread for the experiment. I was surprised how this much  orange thread changes the appearance of the white fabric. Regardless, I was very satisfied with the performance of the process. There was also an unexpected "gift" in this process. Either the cut out holes or the bulky seams left a vague texture that can be seen on the back. 

My mind reels with possibilities of how to use this in the future! And, this little sample was successful enough to give me confidence to move on the machine quilting of my Caterpillar quilt.  

Floating in a Sea of Symbols

Floating in a Sea of Symbols
40" x 40"

created for:  Dinner@Eight, Personal Iconography: Graffiti on Cloth An artistic expression based on personal style

An underlying social message

A story that is told through lines, shapes and imagery

A graphic landscape that conveys a story

A mark, an object, an idea

"As I get older, I indulge in reminiscing about my past. Each ocean layer is comprised of an abstraction of shapes which have multiple meanings for me. This allows me to express my personal history while simultaneously maintain some privacy."

This is an invitational juried exhibit.  Each year when I make my entry, I never know if I will be able to come up with an idea and then be able to execute that idea to my satisfaction, AND, whether or not it will fit in with the rest of the exhibit.  I am delighted to find out that this quilt has been accepted to the exhibit.  I am also very pleased that it is so appealing to me.  Double win!

I had a hard time getting started on this one.  The theme of personal iconography didn't speak to me.  I struggled and struggled.  I gave up more than once.  I tried googling the words in the title.  I tried journaling about what it meant to me....more than once.  The entry description is purposefully vague and open to interpretation, but I was not feeling it.  Sigh...

For me, making art is about expressing something that I need to give my voice to, something personal, something meaningful.  However that voice can also be too personal, sometimes private, and I am not comfortable sharing it with a wider audience.  It is a delicate balance.  

And so, I finally made some progress when I settled on an ocean theme, with blues, and quite a bit of reminiscing.  Each layer goes back to some period in my life.  All of the symbols represented large overlapping chunks of my life, decades.  I also had a long list of symbols I wanted to use, but decided to narrow my choices to those that had multiple meanings for me.  

I started with blue. It has been a while since I have dyed anything or played in my batik studio.  So, I bought some new blue dyes, and set about the task of experimenting so that I could choose my blue palette.

Next stop, the process of patterning my cloth with batik.

These concentric rings would become my sodium chloride ions.  The fabric started as blue, then I stamped some concentric blue circles with different found objects.  This shows what it looked like after bleaching out the blue fabric that was not protected by wax. It was later painted with 2 different colors of dye.  Then the wax was boiled out.  I used fabric paint to paint dots for the electrons, and a black ink pen to put the symbols Na+ and Cl-. (Not tedious at all, eh??)

This one is similar to the above.  It was dyed a dark blue, batiked, and then bleach discharged.  It is waiting to be overdyed.  Notice how the dark blue dye did not discharge to a white (like the fabric above).  That happens sometimes, and it adds interesting color qualities to the next stage of overdyeing.

These two have been dyed, and then batiked.  The next step is the bleach discharge to remove the color.  And then dyeing again to put a contrasting color on top.  

After getting all my fabrics done, I decided which order to put them in by layering them on the floor.

Then, I used a freezer paper template to cut out the wave shapes for each layer.  The fabric was then fused (sweet, sweet Mistyfuse) to some white cotton batting, and then the white batting was trimmed with scissors to echo the shape of the fabric wave.  I built up the quilt one layer at a time, machine quilting as I went.  When I finished, I hand stitched the tiny white float with the girl on it.

As for the bicycle layer?  I ironed freezer paper to the back of a section of blue fabric, and then traced with a black pen from a line drawing underneath.  I taped the drawing and the freezer-paper-backed-fabric to my sliding glass door to let the sun shine through in order to see the drawing through the blue fabric.  Then I colored in different parts of the bicycle with markers and heat set. I LOVE the bicycle!  And, I love the scale of the bicycle!

This exhibit will open at the International Quilt Festival in Houston this fall.  It will be at both Quilt Market (Oct 27-30) and Festival (Nov 1-5).  I can't wait to see it!  The images flooding Facebook yesterday from the selected artists are incredible!

Silver Linings Circles

Silver Linings Circles 
59" x 58.5"

This lovely project came to me through a fabric designer I have known for a few years now, Hoodie Crescent. She wanted me to make a quilt with her fabrics to help with marketing, and so she introduced me to STOF fabrics. I was excited about the opportunity because I just love making quilts. We agreed to a few terms and then I waited for the fabric to arrive!

I am very new to this style of working. It seems odd to me to make a quilt from just one collection of fabrics, even though they are all made to go together, I usually like to work in a more "scrappy" mode. In this gesture, they also sent me some fabrics from another line to put in with the Silver Linings. Very cool! I had no idea how much fabric I asked for until it arrived. It was a LOT of fabric!! I set about washing and ironing! The fabric was so soft, I really enjoyed the meditative quality of handling all of it before I got started!

On another note, I must tell you that they wanted me to write a pattern to go with it. I have no experience writing patterns, so I wrote the pattern as I worked. Lots of notes, measurements and photos helped me put it together. Also, because STOF fabrics is in Denmark, they have many customers who use the metric system, so my pattern needed to be in English and Metric measurements. This added to my anxiety, but ultimately was not a problem, just a bit more work. They will be adding it to their website at some point if you want to download it and make this fun quilt!

My idea was to make some improvisational patchwork (like on the back of Pink and Orange), and cut it into drunkard path's blocks. I grouped the fabrics into 4 color patterns, and set to work. The first one was the creams and greens (and a little pop of aqua blue).

It just needs to be big enough to fit under the template I drew. 

This is a photo of it on my glass door.  Once I pressed the freezer paper template in place, I could easily see that my patchwork had "grown" large enough.  It was time to cut!  Then sew it to the plain cream background piece:

This part is really easy, even though it looks rather lumpy.  It turns out that the bigger the curve, the easier it is to sew!  I simply folded the patchwork in half, twice, to make folds, and then did the same thing to the background piece.  Match the folds, with right sides together, and pin, and then slowly sew easing in the fullness.  You can see more (including videos!) about this simple technique on my blog post with a tutorial for making One Earth.

I used a different patchwork for each quadrant of the circle.  It was easy to make these fabrics sing!

Next up?  How to quilt it!  I decided to keep it simple and modern, long parallel lines, 1/4" spaced.  I think it worked perfectly!  And it leads me to another wonderful Quilt Market story!  I met Becky Richards from Hobbs Batting (which I mentioned on the post regarding my 2nd place win at the Houston Quilt Show for Two Deer, or Too Dear!).  She had sent me some sample battings to play with!  I choose the Cotton (80%)/Wool (20%) blend for this project, and just LOVED it.  It was so easy to work with, easy to quilt, and the quilt looks fantastic after all this quilting!  It hangs so nicely!

This may become my new favorite batting, but I have another Hobbs sample to try, a Silk batt!