Carolyn's Interwoven: Ode to Friendship

THE DESIGN

When the theme, “Interwoven” was announced, I knew that I wanted to create a quilt about how the lives of friends weave together in mysterious ways.  I have a dear friend of thirty years.  The two of us enjoy the labyrinth and celtic symbolism.  So I knew that this quilt would be in honor of her.  I decided to use a circle as a symbol of our church’s turf labyrinth and our circle of friendship.  We also have a meditation garden in the form of a triquetra.  At church, it is symbolic of the Trinity.  But in the ancient Celtic world, it was often used to symbolize the 3 stages of a woman’s life:  maiden, mother and crone.  Perfect!  I would use a triquetra.  But how to draw one? After many frustrating attempts, I finally found a youtube demonstration.  I followed it step by step to produce my design

 

THE PROCESS

I found some hand-dyed cheesecloth in various shades of turquoise, purple  and orange in my stash.  I thought the cheesecloth would be perfect because of its interwoven texture.  At Christmas, my daughter and I played with laying the cheesecloth onto various colors of batiks.  We liked the effect, but how would I adhere it to batik?  I searched the internet without success and decided to experiment.  I took the purple cheesecloth, attached Mystifuse to the back of it, let it cool completely, carefully removed the paper backing and fused it onto a solid blue batik.  WOW - I was hooked!  Then I fused the turquoise onto a light green batik and the orange onto a yellow batik. I LOVED the results.  The next step was to add another interwoven dimension to the background by machine piecing turquoise and orange strips of the fused cheesecloth down one side and across the bottom left corner, interweaving them as I went.

Then I applied  Wonder Under to a hand-dyed fabric that picked up the orange and purple colors and set it aside. I fused a multi-toned turquoise batik for the triquetra, removed the backing, and cut out the circle and triquetra.  I sliced both in strategic places so that I could weave them in and out, and carefully tacked them in place onto resist paper using a hot iron.  When I was satisfied, I placed them on the background cheesecloth and permanently fused them in place; machine stitched the strips and machine appliqued the circle and triquetra.  The border was created using a zig-zag stitch with 3 threads in purple, gold and turquoise.  The final addition was a “tail” comprised of cheesecloth remnants used in the quilt.