Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Eucharistic Prayer C Quilt- Almost Finished

I realized I haven't updated with progress on my Eucharistic Prayer C quilt since early March so thought I'd jump in and give an update.  It's been my primary quilting focus this spring, and I'm really pushing to get it finished!

Back in March I finished the quilting, and after that the next step was to paint in all the quilting in the borders.  I'm going for a dense, richly colored border, something like this or this which meant a lot of quite tedious painting.  I decided to go ahead and block, square, and put the facings on before painting, so that it wouldn't be all raggedy while painting.  Here's what the two panels looked like before I started painting.


 For the painting I used a combination of regular acrylics, setacolor, and fabrico markers.  It was quite challenging as the goal was to stay just inside the quilting lines and as soon as the paint was liquidy enough to apply gracefully, it started to bleed.  I finally just had to give in to the idea that that would happen and let go a bit.  It really took forever, just ask my mom, who for several months would call and ask what I was working on only to hear Still Painting!  My biggest struggle was actually how boring it was which made it hard to get up the motivation to work on it.   I didn't get very many in progress pictures of the painting, but here are a couple so you can see what I'm talking about.




I was so excited to finish the painting, but unfortunately realized shortly thereafter (when I really truly thought I was done) that I'd made a catastrophic error on one of the panels.  Specifically, I'd mixed up the two illuminated initials.  You can see in the first picture below the initial L followed by "t you..."  and in the bottom picture, the initial A followed by "et us..."  As you might imagine, the L goes with "et" and the A goes with the "t you" and I cannot believe I made such a huge mistake.  The whole illuminated initial is 6-8 layers thick, and will have to come off from the blue/purple border forward.  Unfortunately, it's fused down and heavily quilted.

I'm currently now beginning what feels like an insane amount of (quite boring) quilt ripping which is even more fun given how much tedium I just forced myself through with the painting.  Talk about learning lessons the hard way.  I'm just hoping that I can peel the fused initials off cleanly once I get the quilting removed, but it's going to be tricky.  Also tricky will be getting them back down since they're not exactly the same size.  Alas, it's always something.




Someday I will be well and truly finished with this, but until then.....

3 comments:

  1. Oh my gosh. I rarely cry but I think I would have cried over that. It's worth it though. They are going to be spectacular.

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  2. I can imagine the horror when you saw the switch! Good luck on the repair.

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  3. Oh my. One stitch at a time...Pray for peace as you go -- not patience; the latter will only get you into trouble! Blessings!

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