Polychromatic Predilection
40″ x 40″ whole cloth painted with acrylic inks, free-motion machine quilted.
Over the last month, I’ve tried going on a news diet, limiting my intake of news to brief morning and evening reading. I think this is mostly because no matter what happens, nothing seems to change, and the frustration is overwhelming. So I’ve pushed myself to spend more time in the studio and work on things that make me happy and bring me peace of mind.
Each year Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenisen organize an invitational juried exhibit under the name Dinner@8 and the call for entries this year was Personal Iconography: Graffiti on Cloth. This was the perfect opportunity to work with subject matter that brings me joy; succulents and color. Polychromatic Predilection is my entry in the exhibit and I’m thrilled to say my piece was accepted into the exhibit which will travel to the various International Quilt Festivals
I began with a photo I had taken of blossoms on one of my succulent plants. I altered the photo on my iphone in the Prisma photo app. This pushed the colors in my photo to be more dramatically saturated in color and contrast.
Next I created a line drawing of the image in photoshop by selecting ‘trace contour’ under the ‘stylize’ filter, that I could print out at full scale.
I placed the line drawing on my work table and stretched thin plastic painters drop cloth on top and taped it to the sides of my table. Then I stretched a high thread count 100% white cotton fabric over the top, taping it to the sides of the table.
The fabric is thin enough to allow me to see the lines through the fabric without having to trace the whole image onto the fabric with pencil. The line drawing is pretty vague, so I had to rely on looking at the photos on my ipad to really see the image to know what colors went where, the lines mostly helped to keep the image proportionate and to scale as I painted.
I used Golden and Daler Rowney FW acrylic inks to paint this. Acrylic inks do make the fabric pretty stiff when painted opaquely this way, but the benefit is the wide range of pigments available. The painted surface is also a bit more matte than textile paints.
The annoying thing was the week I was painting it was very hot with very low humidity, and my paint kept drying in my palette before I was through working in some areas. Luckily the colors changed constantly. I don’t think I’ve ever painted anything with a broader range of color than this piece has.
One of the other benefits I found to having the fabric stretched, was that it helped me blend the colors a bit easier, since I could ‘scrub’ the surface a bit with my brush.
Finished painting.
It’s amazing how black really makes the colors pop.
When you think you have all the colors of thread you could possibly need…
you discover all sorts of in between grayed colors you don’t have. So often I was wishing I had a light, medium and dark value in a variety of softly colored grays. I think you can never have enough colors of thread!
I think the first stitches are the scariest. I struggled trying to decide what was the best way to quilt this image. I decided to concentrate on matching colors and contour quilting within the space of each color. I changed thread colors a lot!!!
I find that my Bernina 770 doesn’t like super lightweight threads like Superior’s Bottom Line and it’s prone to breaking. I think this happens more with a painted quilt than sewing regular fabric because the fibers in the weave of the painted surface don’t ease apart, allowing the needle and thread to go through as smoothly. It kind of pops holes in the surface instead, this creates more friction on the delicate threads and they break, especially if you get going pretty fast. Occasionally the exact color I needed I only had in Bottom Line, so I resolved this problem by running 2 lines of thread (one off a bobbin) through my sewing machine needle, and that gave it enough strength for quilting and showed up better as well.
Once I finished the contour quilting of the succulent, I went out to my succulents to find inspiration for quilting all that open black space.
These are the drawings I made based on the different plants, that I transferred to my quilt using trans-doodle chalk transfer paper by Mistyfuse.
You can see in the photo above, that the painted fabric is pretty stiff by the slight buckling in the fabric. This is why I chose to try Alex Anderson’s Quilters Select light weight wool batting, because I needed to use something with a lower loft to make quilting a little easier. It worked great. For a quilt using commercial fabrics (not painted with acrylic inks) I would opt for a thicker wool bat that has more loft and gives great stitch definition.
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These photos are blown out a little bit to make them light enough to show the quilting.
I’d love to spark your creativity at one of these upcoming events:
August 18,19 10+ Techniques with Acrylic Inks, 2-day Meissner’s Sewing, Sacramento, CA
October 5-10 New Zealand National Quilt Symposium, Christchurch, NZ
Painting Imagery with Textile Paints 2-days
Tea & Ephemera
Paint & Print-A-Palooza
Blessings in the Wind: Mixed-media prayer flags
NEW
January 10-14, 2018 Craft Napa
Blessings in the Wind: mixed media prayer flags
Tea, Thremofax and Ephemera
Blooming Inspiration
Painting Imagery with Textile Paints
Focus on Fiber Florida 2018
April 1-8 Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL
More info coming soon
August 14-18, 2018 Woodland Ridge Retreat, WI
5 – day Paint and Print-a-palooza retreat
Keep creating, Judy
ABOUT JUDY
Judy is an artist, explorer, image wrangler, knowledge seeker, instructor, speaker, creative alchemist, and purveyor of inspiration, helping others channel creativity on a daily basis.
