Kathy's Spiral - Early Reveal :-/

Greetings, Mavens !   Sorry for the early posting, but the next few days have morphed into a scheduling overload, so I'm posting early, to avoid being really late :-/

"Spirals" turned my brain inside-out.  I thought I had my quilt all planned out until I actually started working on it - Yikes !   My studio's an absolute disaster right now - all those other discarded Spiral ideas lie scattered about on the floor, the tables, the sewing machine, etc.

To create this piece, I started with hand-dyed taupe-colored fabric, then dragged out bunches of surface-design products I hadn't used since I moved from Alaska over 2 years ago.   Using Shiva Oil Paintsticks and 3 of the Shiva "rubbing plates" I transferred several spiral motifs on to the fabric using 3 colors of Paintsticks:  Gold, Bronze, and Copper.   Paintsticks are oil paints (in stick form), so the fabric had to be heat set to preserve the color.  I dry-ironed the fabric, then threw it into the dryer to finish the process.   After that, I gathered all of my spiral-type rubber stamps, stamp pads, inks, etc. and stamped images onto the fabric using whatever colors of ink that would complement the Paintstick colors.

To get the large spiral shape, I used an abstract spiral design fabric and transferred that image to my paintstick/stamped fabric.  Then, using Foot # 21 ('Couching' or 'Cordonnet' foot) on my Bernina 185, I couched very heavy copper/bronze metallic thread (Madeira Glamour, #8 [very heavy, thick thread]) onto the transferred spiral image.   My "couching" thread was Madeira smoke colored "monofilament" thread; I used that same thread in my bobbin.

All those heavy thread tails had to be brought to the back of the quilt which made the back look pretty messy.  I found a complementary fabric for the back, fused it in place, then created a label and fused it to the new backing fabric.     The binding fabric is a spiral-y design fabric that looks great with the new fabric and the spiral design.

Here's a picture of some of the products I used.  The 'rubbing plates', paint sticks, instruction book and DVD are available from Cedar Canyon Textiles, Inc. (on-line), from Interweave Press (on-line), and several other on-line sources.    The background fabric you see here was "rust dyed" while I was still in Alaska, and is one of my favorite kinds of fabric to use :-)        Peace & blessings to all.....  Kathy