New Quilt: Only You

Last fall I started a new fairly large art quilt.  My goal was to create a 3D piece using a form I hadn't tried before.  I wasn't sure what that was going to be exactly, but in my brain I was thinking about a 3D interpretation of an onion quilting pattern.  I knew I'd need a big piece of fabric, so I pulled out this 8 yard cut I found in one of my Georgia boxes (thanks Georgia!).  It was some sort of synthetic, I can't remember exactly what color it started out, but fairly pale, and with a tiny amount of texture.  I folded it in half to paint like I normally do, but even so it was too big to fit on my worktable so I painted it all scrunched up.  I was going for late sunset-into-night colors.

My trusty studio helpers were along for the ride as usual.

 

After the paint dried, I quilted it.  I used the ceiling mounted clamp system I rigged up last year; it was especially useful for this piece because the piece was so large and heavy.

Sorry, but here's Spooky helping again.  He's not very good at quilting though.

You can see in this post-quilting close up the really cool pooling paint and vertical line patterns that came from the wrinkles in the fabric while painting.  I love the extra texture they give the surface.  As usual, I quilted in every color of the rainbow.

Here you can see the final piece all quilted.  After squaring up it was eleven feet long by 44" tall. 

I finished the edges by couching this delightful dark purple fuzzy yarn that some other friends destashed to me, it was such a pretty color and texture but there wasn't enough to knit with so I was glad to use it for this.  It was a lot of edge, especially on my regular sewing machine.

After finishing the edges, it was time to start the sculpting process.  I started by pleating, and will leave you with this until next time!