Southwest Spirit

Quilt Documentation #148

Southwest Spirit

This past week my two pieces “Southwest Spirit” and “ Renewal” were juried into The Englehart Area Artists Juried Show. There were 38 chosen from over 80 entires.

This show was open to several art categories: Oil, Acrylic, Watercolour, Pastel, Print Making, Mixed Media, Sculpture, Photography and Fibre Arts.

I had planned to do something 3-D with Southwest Spirit but could not get it to work the way I wanted.  But  I will try again another time.

Making this piece was a bit frustrating, and I documented most of it, so bear with me.

This started out as a paper towel that I used as a wipe rag while dyeing some fabrics.

I glued it to muslin with diluted glue to make paper fabric.

paper towel glued to muslin

When dry, I added batting and backing and free motion quilted it with variegated thread. I also added beads, some cover up the holes in the paper towel.

I quilted a black background with variegated thread and discarded it as too busy and settled on a black background quilted with black thread.

The little quilt was fused and hand couched to it with red crochet cotton.

I took the other half of the paper towel and glued it to a black cotton instead of muslin because I wanted to make a raw edge binding and did not want any white showing. Little did I know that it would darken the colours so much.  See the difference in the before and after photos.

Before:

Before gluing to black fabric

After:

After gluing to black fabric

You can see in the "After" photo below, where a binding was stitched almost all the way around and I changed my mind again.

I thought the dark paper fabric would work, so I cut the background quilt down to a more square shape and zigzagged the 1” strips on for the binding. I think it looks a lot like leather .

This quilt had a southwest flavour to me, hence the name and the Kokopelli on the hanging sleeve on the back.

Southwest Spirit back, sleeve and label

This quilt measures 22" x 19 1/2". 

I'm so glad it's finished.

I will blog about "Renewal" in my next post.

Linking up to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday and The Needle and Thread Network WIP.

Happy Quilting,

Terry