textile dreams – fibery wake up

Green Woman #12 – Finished!

Celebrations are in order! I’ve finally finished all the invisible bits and pieces that were still missing, and now I have a finished quilt I’m very happy with. Here it is:

In addition to putting on the binding, adding a label and a tunnel for hanging, I added a few tiny details that were better left for embroidery and beads than for patchwork:

Here are the sundew flowers with the shiny beads, and I also gave the flower on the upper right a few:

That’s one long-term project done, and I am happy with the result. Who knows when I’ll be able to show it off to people in real life, though, with everything that’s not happening this year.

Off to find something new to get obsessed with, now…

Green Woman #11 – Quilting

I was pretting busy during the last weeks, what with a virtual Worldcon and all that. I can’t believe it’s been a year since Dublin 2019, where this project was conceived. When we saw this last, I was trying to figure out how to do the quilting, and right now, this part is finished!

Free machine quilting is one of my favourite parts of making a quilt, even though it tends to be a struggle to maneuver the quilt through my very normal-sized sewing machine. I have seriously been eyeing some of the dedicated quilting machines at times, but then, who has that much space to spare?

So, here’s some progress shots I took:

You can see that I followed the line drawing pretty closely in the coloured areas, which makes the quilting do double duty – adding detail to the image as well as securing the layers together. For the white areas, I knew I had to come up with something different, since those are totally unstructured in the original image. I already had experimented with leaves on the postcards, and my thoughts went to something like a wild rose hedge for the foreground. So I did some doodling:

These are not quite what I finally used, but having them on the page helped me visualize how I wanted the border to look. To stay with the clean look of the original, I was going to quilt with white thread on white fabric, so this will be one of those nice things you only see when you look at the quilt close-up, but shouldn’t make a huge impression on the overall look. Here’s a detail, so you can see how it came out in the end:

The big flower is actually the outline of a flower that was woven into the fabric of the damask table cloth I used. It’s pretty much invisible unless you look very closely, but it’s there and it makes me happy.

After removing the basting stitches and squaring up the edges, here’s the pretty much finished quilt:

That’s most of the creative work done! Next I will be attaching the invisible binding, and then do the small bits of hand embroidery and beading I have planned for the sundews and flower. It might still be a while, since currently it’s way too hot to sit under a quilt and sew!

Green Woman #10 – More Samples

So, last time I ended with a finished top. The next steps were making a quilt sandwich and basting it, thus preparing for quilting, and actually figuring out how to quilt the thing, which would involve more sampling.

Basting happened, here she is spread out on the table all stitched up:

For the sampling part, I decided to try something different and make some fabric postcards with the interesting features I wanted to get a handle on before embarking on the real thing. Here’s the motifs I choose:

As with the real quilt, I ironed on the pieces using Bondaweb. The choice of background fabric is not quite optimal for the green pitcher plant, but the background will be rather more brownish for the real thing.

I then quilted the whole piece, trying to figure out what would work:

I decided to completely ignore any shading and mostly go for recreating the black lines from the line drawing, and I think this mostly works and fits the medium. For the white, I tried fairly dense quilting on the rightmost piece, and then just did a few smaller leaves on the other two. This looks much better to me, and I’ll do a variant of that (suited to the larger spaces I’ll have there) on the quilt.

After aquiring more of the material used for backing those – a very thin but stiff sheet which I think is normally used when sewing bags – I cut them apart and finished them. I figured out a process that works pretty painlessly, so I may do more cards in the future. Here’s the whole row, with added bling for the sundew:

I was planning to try out different ways to do the sundews, but found the perfect beads, which together with the dark red embroidery thread convinced me on the first try.

Here are the cards close-up for your viewing pleasure (click to enlarge).

I’ve already started quilting, but of course this gets harder when there’s a whole quilt attached to the small piece you’re working on, so I’ll probably be a while.