Finished Confession Quilt: Finally Blogged

This quilt has been finished for a couple of months and only recently did I realize that I'd never done a final blog post about it.  I checked in a few months back on a WIP: Wednesday to get opinions about the binding, but never followed up!

This piece is part of my ongoing series depicting parts of the Episcopal liturgy.  In this case, the prayer is our confession of sin, the text of which reads (1982 Book of Common Prayer, p. 360)

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. 
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. 
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.

In common with many of our prayers, it is said aloud and in unison every Sunday, giving a very communal feeling to a very personal consideration of what each of our failings are.  The really personal nature of this particular prayer is what prompted me to take a slightly different approach to the quilt.  Many of my illuminated quilts have a medieval-inspired feel, and the letters are often done using silk screens and "fancy" fonts.  In this case, I wanted to incorporate that personal element and decided to use my own handwriting.  The letters were printed from a handwritten transparency using sun-printing, more of which can be found in the previous blog post.

Confession. c. 2017, Shannon Conley

The center medallion is floating, connected only to the outer ring by thread, and is a slightly different approach to openwork compared to some of my other pieces.  I love the openness and lightness.  It means the quilt takes some of its personality from what it's hanging on, another way of being even more personal.  In my studio, it's currently hanging on my bright yellow wall which really brings out the warm colors.  Before adding the stick quilting which holds the medallion in and which grounds the corners, I quilted the blue background in repeating circling layers of text reading "what I have left undone, what I have left undone, what I have left undone...."  The things that are left undone are the things that constantly bother me, I never know if I've done enough or could do more, or missed my chance to do something important or kind or right.

Overall I'm pleased with the way this turned out.  I wish it was easier to read the text of the prayer, but I think it's ok that for this piece it's more subtle.  I'm working on projects for a whole bunch of different things right now, but hopefully will get back to this series towards the end of the year.

Linking up with Nina-Marie!

WIP Wednesday: Work on the Confession Quilt

Morning everybody,  I'm jumping in today with an update and request for input on one of my ongoing projects.  

It's in my on the Episcopal Liturgy and is almost done, but I'm stuck on the finishing.  A little background, the central carries a prayer (the confession) printed using Jacquard's sun printing stuff.  I blogged about the printing process last fall and am finally back working on the project after a few intervening things.  

The whole medallion is floating in the turquoise frame and is connected to the frame only by thread. The white you see is openwork, that's just my design wall shining through. 

The whole piece is about 36 x 36 to give you an idea size wise.  I usually do a facing, but I feel like this might benefit from the framing effect of the binding.  I've pinned up some potential binding choices, I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on finishing options- either of what's up there or other suggestions.  In the second overall picture I cropped it down more what you'd see of the fabrics if I used them for binding.

What do you think?

Linking up with Nina-Marie and Free Motion Mavericks!

New Manuscript Quilt

You may recollect I've been working on a series of quilts depicting the pieces of the Episcopal liturgy, specifically the Holy Eucharist, Rite 2.  The next section I decided to work on is the Confession.  In thinking about this piece I decided I wanted to use my own handwriting rather than a more formal script as I've used in previous pieces.

I didn't want to digitally print it, so I started thinking about ways to get my handwriting onto fabric.  At first I thought I'd try bleach discharge using a bleach pen, but on my little samples, the bleach pen bled so much that it wasn't really legible.

Next I thought about using Esterita Austin's ink/paint transfer technique.  I'd previously used it on my seed packet quilt and thought it might work here.  Basically, you can paint or write on parchment paper, layer it with misty fuse and organza and the paint/ink is picked up by the organza/misty fuse when you iron.  Previously I'd done it with paint, which worked quite well, but for the handwriting I wanted to use marker as I'm not very graceful writing with a brush.  I did some sharpie writing on the parchment (top picture), and then did the mistyfuse transfer onto organza (middle picture).  It worked fine, but because the misty fuse has the texture of a fine webbing and the marker ink doesn't have any inherent structure to it (like a layer of paint), the ink only transfers exactly where the misty fuse fibers were.  This resulted in a sort of faint transfer which wasn't exactly what I was going for.  I tried it using wonder under instead of misty fuse since that's a little denser, but it really didn't work (bottom picture); I just got a big mess.

Next I decided to try sunprinting.  I purchased some Jacquard SolarFast, a sunprinting fluid that allows you to print in many different colors, not just the blue of traditional cyanotypes.  I got a bottle of purple and a bottle of orange.  You paint it on, then while wet, put on your items for resist, cover them with glass, and put them in the sun.  Many people print black and white photos on transparencies and place those under the glass for printing, so I figured I could write with a black marker and that would work.  I did two small test pieces on different background fabrics.  For one (Alleluia Alleluia below) I used a standard sharpie and wrote on the transparency.  For the other (Go in Peace below), I wrote with standard sharpie directly on my glass.  The two pictures are just different amounts of time in the sun so you can see the color develop.  Writing on the glass was easier since it meant only positioning one thing, but I was concerned that because the writing was on the top of the glass, the thickness of the glass might make the writing less crisp.

Indeed that's what happened.  Sorry for the terrible lighting below, I'm not sure why I had so much reflected light off these samples.  Anyway, you can see that the writing is definitely crisper and easier to read in the Alleluia sample than the Go in Peace sample.  In fact on the Go in Peace sample, you can hardly even see the words, especially on the purple.

I decided to use orange for the center of my print (where most of the writing would be) and purple for the outside ring since the writing was easier to see on the purple.  I did like the look of the purple and orange on the light yellow print background, so I grabbed another piece of light yellow tone-on-tone from my stash.  I also decided to go ahead and write on the transparency rather than the glass and use a thicker marker.  The final size of my print is about 30 x 30 so that meant a large piece of glass, transparency, and fabric to line up.  It was a bit tricky lining it all up in the dark, and then my giant sheet of glass broke in two leaving some very sharp edges, but in the end I got it all layered up and into the sun.  Here it is mid-print.  The thing that looks like a white string across the top is actually the place where the glass broke.  I had to hold it together with clear packing tape.  If you look closely you can see the transparencies underneath (where the writing is).  The little whitish squares are the scotch tape I used to hold the transparency sheets together.  Unfortunately you can't use the transparencies without the glass overlays because they blow away. 

 Here's how the final print turned out.  I like it- the text is subtle, but legible if you look very closely, which is fine with me.  I have great plans for how I want to turn this into a quilt, but sadly there are a few more high-priority things in the pipeline right now so it'll be the first of the year or later when I get back to this.

What kind of experiences have you had with these techniques?