New Quilt: The Bromeliad

Over the last couple of years I've made two large abstract sculptural flower quilts, one of a dahlia and one of an iris, and I knew I wanted to complete a third one for our show at the NM State Capitol.  I have this lovely red bromeliad at the house, and I've loved bromeliads ever since my dad gave my mom this pink one decades ago.  A few months back mine started to bloom again, and I decided it should be my next abstracted flower.  All of these three-dimensional pieces have used a different approach for making them hold their shape, and this time I was inspired by this origami ornament my mom folded for me a while back, and I decided I'd use that shape as the flower base.

I started with some red velvet (thanks Georgia!) and layered it with wool batting and regular cotton backing, but I decided to include a layer of aluminum window screen inside my quilt sandwich (like in the Tesseract) to give me a little bit of structural support and sculptability.  I first quilted the fold lines so I'd know where/how to fold it into the origami structure, and painted it.  After painting, I then quilted away.

All of the edges will be inside the final sculpture, so after quilting I squared up and then finished the edges by wrapping the front fabric around and machine stitching down.  The next step was to start folding, and you can see the shape of the original ornament start to emerge.

I stitched along three of the four edges that hold the 3D structure and left the 4th one open so I could get inside the structure to mess with the leaves/petals.  I wound up putting velcro along the edges so I could get it to stay shut later.

The next step was to make the leaves/petals, and I made three different sizes out of three different painted red, green, and pink fabrics.  I had couple of different red velvets/velours, a pink synthetic fabric with a weave that reminded me of a coarse shot cotton, and a green sweater knit that I used for the petals/leaves. I quilted them in big groups leaving a channel on the edge of each one (to cut them apart) and in the middle for a piece of wire.  It was way easier to just leave a channel for the wire rather than try to quilt around the wire already inside like I did on the iris!  Alas, in the end I made way too many petals, so I have a ton of them leftover in case I ever want them for something else.

Next week I'll share pictures of how I attached the petals and show the finished quilt!