Well, I'm shamefully behind on blogging again. This was my last quilt for 2021 (it was a bad year for me quilting wise, but that's a story for another day), and I finished it several months ago, but am just now getting around to blogging about it.
We moved labs early in 2021, and in the process I found three boxes of 1ml serological pipettes that everyone hated, so I took them home determined to use them for something. Each one is about 11 inches long and a rigid tubular shape. With only the vaguest idea of a plan, I started covering them with some fabric I'd painted. I had a total of 300, and after covering about half of them, I realized I needed to branch out color-wise (all the original fabric was the pinky-orange you see in the second picture, so I added the turquoise and a few purple and fuchsia ones.
After covering them, I took the remaining hand-painted fabric and attached it (front and back) to a big piece of peltex interfacing. I wanted something with a little more stiffness than batting in the middle layer of the quilt.
The next step was sewing in the spikes; I sewed them to the background one row at a time, and while the peltex quilts and sews well, it is stiff and hard to maneuver, especially once you start sewing down hundreds of fabric covered rigid plastic tubes!
After getting all the spikes sewn in, I quilted the background. It was tough to free-motion quilt something so stiff but I got through it!
After quilting, I loved the dimension of the spikes but the background felt very plain and bland. It lacked vibrancy and contrast- too much peachy pink. So I painted the bottom darker and more purple, and added lots more color to the top including intense pinks and yellows.
I really wanted it to feel like the spikes were protruding in all directions, so I stitched the whole quilt to a half-circle sized piece of sonotube. It's what they use to hold concrete when pouring concrete footers. They're made out of very sturdy cardboard, so it felt like a great thing to use as an armature.
After mounting to the cardboard, the next step was to stitch the spikes into their spikey positions. In order to get them to stand out properly, they're hand stitched to each other. The last construction step was to add some roving wrapped wire snaking along both the top and the bottom. I love the extra texture that added. You can see it pinned in place in the picture below,
This was a fun quilt to work on; come back on Wednesday to see pictures of the finished piece.
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