Pictures of the Art Quilt

I hope everyone is enjoying themselves as the weather turns colder (at least for those of us in the States) and we gear up for the crazy frenzy that occurs between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm enjoying the lack of political ads - and the brief time before we are inundated with holiday ads.

I have still been working on the art quilt I mentioned a few posts ago. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for an order of thread I ordered on November 2 - so I'm getting to a point where I have to stop creating until that order arrives. (Not real happy with the vendor - never emailed me to let me know there was a delay - I had to email her to find out where the order is...and it looks like it may be at least another week until I receive the thread. Grrr)

I painted the fabric I'll be using as the background for the 4 blocks I've made. Everything on this piece is done by hand - but not by choice! lol I want a sewing machine so badly I am having royal fits...but it will be quite some time before the royal budget allows for that.

Here is a portion of the background I painted:

It is really hard to get the colors to show up correctly on here - but the top scan is closer to the real colors than the bottom scan. I used Dye-Na-Flow, Lumiere, Neopaque, and Jacquard Textile Paints. The background colors were achieved with Outside the Margin's Color Mists. The Color Mists aren't safe to wash - they are sprayable watercolors. Since I won't be washing this art quilt, I wasn't worried about using them. I also used (regular dye) stamp pads.


On the portion above, you can see some faint writing in the upper right corner. That is from where I tried to iron on my design. It didn't work for some reason - the transfer pencil I used to trace my designs with would not come off clearly - I didn't have an issue with any other panel picture, just this one. :(

Since I know nothing about fabric and sewing, all I know is that the fabric I used is white cotton. It has little stars on it - which really provided a cool "relief". It broke up the color washes really well.


Since the "family" panel I did will be shorter than the rest of the panels, I had each of my childebeasts write "I love you" on a piece of paper - which I then transfered to the painted fabric. I stitched over the transfer. It turned out well, but hard to see in the scans.


This is the quote I chose to include with the quilt. I drew the flower "trellis" at the top and the handwriting is mine (thats why it's a bit crooked! lol). It is yellow in the middle because it's the one that wouldn't transfer very well - so the iron got a bit hot on the transfer paper while I was trying to get the transfer to work better.


This is the drawing that started it all. I was just doodling while I watched TV with the beasts, when the Princess said she wanted me to make her a blanket with these flowers on it. (She also named each flower - since they aren't "real" flowers, she named them from a combination of all their names.)


Here is the family I drew - it's supposed to represent the four of us...and our two cats. I got the people idea from a website - but I can't remember for the life of me which one it was. The people are someone else's idea - I took the idea and tweaked it so they represented us a little more.

The last panel is where I wrote their names really big. Their names are intertwined and will be stitched with metallic thread.

So there they are, finally! It took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to work the scanner (sad but true!), but I finally have them posted. Now I can get back to work on finishing the art quilt - and post pictures when that is complete. I'm bummed I won't be able to do any embellishing with the sewing machine because I love that look - but everything will have to be done by hand. Not sure what I'll use for the background fabric - I'll be as surprised as you are. lol

Comments and suggestions are welcome!