New Embroidered Quilt: Eclipse

A couple of weeks back, I shared my enthusiasm for a new-to-me form of Scandinavian embroidery called Bottensöm.  I enjoyed making my little hoop so much I decided I wanted to use it in a larger quilt.  I've had this semi-sheer black swiss dot fabric in my stash for a long time and decided to use it for the top layer of the piece.  And since I wanted to preserve some of the sheerness, I decided to forgo a batting layer.  Bottensöm embroidery works off of a grid, so I first marked my grid before layering the fabric and starting to stitch.  I decided to use a paralellogram grid rather than a rectangular or square grid for my bottom section and also try some bottensöm on a sitched star pattern (the top two medallions). I'm very new to this so I wasn't sure how it would work, but I marked my fabric and got started.

This form of embroidery pulls on the fabric a fair amount, so normally it would be worked in a hoop.  Since I obviously don't have a quilt sized hoom (this is about 31" x 42") so I decided to layer my fabrics and staple them onto a wooden frame I made out of 1x2 boards.  The top layer is a piece of solid black fabrics, and underneath I have stapled on strips of various other sparkly fabrics.  There's a bright pink metallic, a sheer blue metallic, a dense sparkly gold mesh, and several different layers of tulle. They give a nice color range under the black- subtle color to add some depth. 

Here you can see a the fabrics all layered down and stapled to the frame.

For doing the stitching, I braced the frame between my sewing table and my rolling work table.  I could reach it reasonably well from either side, the trickiest part was the very middle; my arms didn't like reaching to stitch quite that far.  You can see here below the layers of grid stitching that form the base for bottensöm.  For all the stitching I used pearl cotton, thin yarn, Ricky Tims Razzle Dazzle thread, and any other heavyish thread/embroidery stuff.

In bottensöm, each place the grid lines crossed is stitched over with a cross stitch, you can see I've started that here.  On the inner rings where I won't do any additional stitching I added small beads to my cross stitches.

Here you can see what it looks like after starting the pull-across stitches that make the distinctive bottensöm look.

After I finished all the stitching I added a bunch of Shiva Paintstik to enhance the stitching design.  

After finishing all the stitching, I carefully pried up all the staples and removed the piece from the frame.  I added a little traditional machine quilting around the borders and then just finished up the edges.  Come back later in the week to see the finished piece!