Second Fall Quilt

A week or so ago I shared a Halloween quilt I made using some of the fabrics I dyed and printed in Betty Busby's class.  It incorporated some bits of leftover improv pieced strip sets, and today I'm sharing what they were leftover from!

Last fall I took this picture outside the building where I work.  I thought it would make up into a nice fall quilt, so earlier this year when I was having some other things printed from spoonflower, I had this picture printed too.  I had a weirdly narrow strip of fabric left in my spoonflower width, so I cropped this down to fit that space.  I hate wasting fabric when printing from them.  It's printed on a shiny polyester, so in person it has nice reflectivity, which I think goes with the way the rain was reflecting in the picture.

I decided to do a fairly simple composition, just framing the picture with a border, and decided on some combination of stripes in the border.  I wanted to use my combination of weird fabrics, but those are dreadful to piece with so it came out very improv-like, by which I mean uneven :)


I used a fairly wide variety of fabrics, including sari silk, plain silk, commercial polyester, and hand dyed/painted silk and polyester.  That teal/green/yellow piece is actually a chopped up silk scarf I painted a long time ago.  I also included strips from a cotton dupatta from a salwar kameez I have but don't wear anymore.  The base is black cotton, but there's tons of gold embroidery in it, so strips of that are what I used in the strip sets, as a skinny inner border and as an outer border.

This is what it looked like after  I assembled the top.  It was challenging because since the piecing was so wonky it had a sort of sucked-in-waist look which was decidedly unsquare.  

When I have abstract things that do this, I usually just hack them off square at the end, but of course with the clear embroidered border, I couldn't do that.  I blocked very aggressively, and got it more or less in shape.  There are still a few parts where the binding is uneven with regards to the embroidery pattern in the outer border, but that's life.  It didn't help that I decided to use a dark purple silk for the binding,  that of course was very shifty too.  And then to top it off, the dark purple silk bled everywhere when I got it wet to block.  Luckily it didn't back stain and I think I got it pretty well taken care of.  

So there we have it!  Another fall quilt!  I enjoyed working on it and now I really have to get back to the things I'm *supposed* to be working on!  I hope you're having pretty fall weather wherever you are!

 Linking up to Nina-Marie's this week, click over for more fabulous artistic fiber creations.