New Quilt: Lantern

Some of you may remember a few years ago I made this quilt (called tesseract) that was made out of separate quilted triangles reassembled and sculpted.  I'd wanted to do something more in this vein, and while being inspired by all the kirigami I also discovered contemporary origami artists doing really cool things with corrugations.  See for example, the flickr streams of Ray Schamp and Beth Johnson

Upon closer inspection, I realized that one of the easiest "Beginner" corrugation patterns used flying geese blocks, so I figured I had to try it!  I dug out all my already quilted scraps (edges cut off and practice swatches), and started cutting out triangles.  Here they are pinned to my design wall.

To hold the triangles together, I sandwiched them between two layers of pale tulle and quilted around them.  Here you can see the colors are a bit muted from the tulle.

One of the things that was troublesome last time was keeping the loose triangles straight while I quilted them between two layers of tulle.  To solve this problem, this time I hung a sheet of plastic drop cloth on my design wall before pinning up the triangles. I then used tiny dots of hot glue to stick the triangles to the tulle.  I figured the plastic would peel off, but alas no.  So now the piece consists of a layer of tulle, a layer of quilted triangles (front/batting/back) another layer of tulle, and a layer of drop cloth.  Oops.

Here you can see it (from the back) in the initial stages of folding/sculpting.

To help keep the spacing between each unit even, I stitched chunks of old straws (previously used to hold up kirigami legs) between each unit using my long doll making needle.

In envisioned it as a half-barrel shape, kind of like a wall-mounted lantern, and I had to figure out a way to give it that curved shape.  I decided on a chicken wire/wood armature, and of course my arms suffered a bit for that.

Come back tomorrow to see the finished piece!