On Iris: An Update

Some of you may remember my new sculptural quilt "On Iris" that I blogged about a few weeks back.  I thought it was finished, but several different people thought it might be better with something inside to help draw in the viewer.  Just for reference, here's what it looked like the last time I blogged about it:

The more I looked at iris, the more I was inclined to agree, there really isn't a big open space in the middle, it's filled with all sorts of little petals/reproductive parts.  It seemed quite confusing actually, and I had a hard time finding good clear pictures. I finally settled on a style arm with an anther underneath it; botanists and gardeners, apologies if this is all wrong....  The style arm looked mostly like a smaller petal, while the anther looked sort of stick like and fuzzy.

I made my style arm out of leftover pieces I'd painted and quilted for the large iris, and just sort of shaped them until I was reasonably happy.  It was a bit tricky, since I'd recently cut up all the big scraps from the project thinking I was done with it, but I found enough pieces.  For the anther, I stitched a bunch of layers of batting around a piece of wire and fluffed and fluffed and fluffed and then painted.  This was the first version, which was ok from the standpoint of the little petal, but the size, fleshy color, and general protrudingness of the anther made it look way to much like an inappropriate body part, especially in person.  It really jumped out at you in a quite incongruous way.

So I trimmed it down and reshaped it and repainted it and now I think it looks much more like a flower innard.  I like the way there's now detail inside but it doesn't overwhelm the shape or impact of the large petals.

I'm still not sure I'm completely sold on it, but it'll continue to live there on the wall and if I get inspired, I'll change it up some more.

New Quilt: On Irises

I've been working on this quilt (is it a quilt?  what do you think?)  for a few months now and finally have it finished. Mike took some pictures of it last week so I thought it was finally time to share it.  Some of you may remember my giant abstracted interpretation of a dahlia and this is another piece in that line.

On Iris, c. 2017, Shannon Conley

Going into it I wanted to do purple and yellow as my primary colors and I wanted to find a way to make it large and 3D but not have to use the fabric stiffener like I did on the dahlia.  I'm still experimenting with different ways to support dimensional fabric pieces, and this time I decided to use a wire infrastructure.

I had this idea to do three petals, each reaching out of a surrounding frame, one flopped forward and attached to the frame at the bottom and two pointing upward and attached to their frame at the side.  I started by painting my petals, and quickly realized that I needed both front and back to be nicely painted because the "back" of the quilt is actually the "front" of the petal.  If that's clear as mud, stick with me, it might make more sense in a minute.  I started out with three different pieces of purple fabric and three different brown pieces.  The purples were a fairly heavy weight polyester satin, while one of the browns was a similar fabric and the other two were very light weight, almost like a brown and white polka dot chiffon.  I painted them with acrylic and latex paint, and with my fabric very very wet.  I love the way the paint sits on the surface of the purple and blends so fabulously.  Those swirly bits are my favorite part.

After that, I made separate quilt sandwiches for each of the three petals and put several pieces of wire between the layers.  The wire was sufficiently heavy weight that I could NOT quilt over it, so I quilted right up next to it to keep it in place.  I accidentally broke 6 needles during the making of the quilt while dealing with the wire.  After stitching around the wire, I free motion quilted the rest of the petals with lots of fun colors of thread.  Here are the three petals from the brown side and the purple side.

After finishing the quilting, I cut the petals out and started figuring out how I wanted to sculpt it and how I could get it to maintain it's shape and be self-supporting.

My original plan was to have each petal still attached in it's frame, something like the version below, but I could not get the upper petals to look right that way.  I kept trying different things, but finally realized I was going to have to detach the side petals from their frames.

Here you can see it all pinned up, more or less how the finished quilt was, but at this point nothing was attached, it was all just pinned to the design wall with about a million pins.  I had to make a full frame for the back to hang it from rather than just a top slat.  That meant four pockets to stitch down (yuck), but it was necessary to give the back piece enough stability to support the rest of it without crumpling.  Then there are smaller pockets on the back and the upper petals attach to those.  In the picture below you can see what looks like dark strings sticking up off the top of the left petal, but that is actually roving-coated wire.  I got it at a fiber festival and used it to edge each petal.  That way the edges can be shaped, and the end wire bits can be stuck around to the back of the piece to anchor the petals.

Here's the final flower, completely self supporting, along with some closeups.  I love the way it turned out, especially the strong bright colors and the brown background.  I really love the purple and yellow with the little hints of green where the colors meet up.  And even though getting this to be self-supporting and structurally stable was really challenging, I like this method better than the fabric stiffener.  I'm going to try another method on my next quilt, we'll see how that works.  I'm going to do at least one more of these abstracted flowers, but I haven't decided which one yet.  I'm open to suggestions if anybody wants to nominate something!