My little quilt's construction process was basically so simple, that I almost hesitate to write a process post. But you know me--I love posting, so I'm going to write about it, despite the fact that likely no one will learn anything new from my describing the process! As I did before,
I'll post some pictures and discuss the construction in the captions.
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I started with this photo. Noting the colors of the dead grasses and weeds, I chose chiefly batik fabrics from my stash that echoed those colors. I had no lavender for the flowers, so I bought a fat quarter of lavender batik and also some yellow glass beads. I luckily had a wonderful leaf-print batik for the leaves. |
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| After adhering fusible (I used Wonder Under) to fabric pieces cut in 3" or 4" strips, I cut them again into random widths and lengths. Then I began laying them out on the background fabric (which was a leftover hand-painted piece from another quilt). I had cut the background over-sized and adhered it to some fusible fleece. Once I had my "weeds" in place, I fused them, using a fairly hot iron and parchment paper laid over, to protect my iron from the glue. |
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| Next I cut free-hand, just using the photograph as a rough guide, the leaves from the leaf-printed batik fabric, which had also been prepared with the Wonder Under. These, too, were fused down. |
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| I couched some gold yarn here and there on the quilt to add another color and some texture or dimension. I purchased a couching or braiding foot for my Bernina at the Houston Quilt Festival, anticipating this step. It worked beautifully for this regular wool yarn. |
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| I loved the look of this "hairy" yarn, but soon learned NOT to couch it with my couching foot, but to pull the loose strands to one side as I zig-zagged over the yarn to couch it down, using one of my open toed feet. |
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| I hand-sewed the yellow glass beads to the purple centers of the lavender flowers and then appliqued the flowers down with a zig-zag stitch. The leaves were similarly appliqued. |
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I backed the quilt with a batik fabric which picked up the colors of the quilt, and I used this same fabric for the binding, applied in the conventional way, except that I decided not to miter the corners. As you can see, the quilt was quilted with the embroidery floss and an embroidery running stitch BEFORE backing and binding, as I didn't want to have to hand-stitch through three layers, especially with one of the layers being the hard-to-penetrate batik. |
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| Here you can see that I used some olive green floss here and there, in addition to the light brown. |
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| I love the look of hand-stitching with floss on art quilts--a technique used occasionally in the inspirational TWELVE BY TWELVE book. My arthritic hands find it easier to stitch using this running stitch than with tiny conventional quilting stitches. |
