When I left off on this the last time, I'd finished printing my spiral-shaped Gloria Patri and was thinking about the quilting. The first thing I did was to quilt around all the letters using white thread. You can't see the quilting from the front but it stabilized the quilt and made the lettters puff a bit. Here's the back where you can see all the quilting around the letters.
Then I browsed through one of my favorite sources for quilting ideas, especially for this kind of quilt, A Treasury of Hours by Fanny Fay-Sallois. It's full of selections from many different historical books of hours.
This time, the border designs on a picture of Matthew the Evangelist from the Rivoire Book of Hours caught my fancy. Inspired by that leafy but bold pattern, I started quilting.
The quilting spirals out with the text, in the middle the stems are blue and the flowers are red, as they spiral out the colors shift through several different shades of turquoise/blue green and pink/lavender to finally land on green stems with purple flowers. There are multiple shades of thread in each section and the quilting took forever because there were so many stops and starts. But it was very meditative, and not unenjoyable. Unfortunately the texture in the bengaline fabric is almost like very small corduroy wales, and this makes the quilting look weirdly pixely or jerky in some places which made me very unhappy. Also, because the background is white and the quilting is contrasting, all the little mistakes show, but I guess that's part of the process!
Linking up with the great Nina-Marie today.
This is amazing work! Will you be entering in the sacred threads show? This is certainly good enough and it is appropriate for the theme.
ReplyDeleteOh Shannon, when I say this blows me away, I am not saying that lightly. I absolutely love this and I am so in awe of the direction you are going. I studied multiple Book of Hours in my Master's art history - and I say pages from the Limbourg Brothers Book of Hours (one of the first) at the Cloisters Museum in New York. Have you been? You must go if you are ever there. I have always wanted to do a quilt of one of these pages. You have inspired me immemensly here. I want to see it in person... let me know if you show it anywhere - or heaven forbid, you want to sell it?
ReplyDeleteWhoa! So very beautiful and yet what struck me...was that from "afar", from the back (i.e., the reverse)...it struck me as Hebrew lettering rather than Latin...the Sh'ma ("The LORD your God, the LORD is one"...http://www.jewfaq.org/prayer/shema.htm...Two faiths, one truth. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteA most interesting concept. What a lot of stops and starts with the color changes, but so worth it.
ReplyDeletePhenomenal! I can't imagine how hard it was to quilt around those letters so beautifully and then the decorations around the letters......Wow!! I also went to your new website, so nice to see all your work together. And kudos for getting into that show about red (forgot the name). Mother and daughter in the same show, very cool!
ReplyDeleteBeautiful stitching!
ReplyDeleteThat's a lot of work you've done. I like where you got your quilting inspiration. I particularly like the contrast of the centre quilting and even how it looks on the back. I look forward to seeing it all finished.
ReplyDeleteThis is very beautiful. I enjoyed your description of how you did the silk screen, too.
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