New Quilt: The Triangles Re-visited (Tesseract #2)

A couple weeks ago I blogged about one of my newer quilts, Tesseract #1 (aka the Triangles).  In case you don't remember, it was a dimensional piece sculpted on window screen.

Tesseract #1, Shannon Conley, c. 2018

I loved the way it turned out, but the dimensional nature means that I can't show it in a lot of places.  So I thought I'd take a picture of it, get it printed very large at Spoonflower, and then quilt it.  My goal was to see how dimensional I could get it to look while still being completely flat.  I juiced up the colors a little bit for a couple of reasons.  First was that I wasn't sure whether the printing process would dull them (although I've always had good luck with Spoonflower before).  The second was because I wanted the colors to be more vibrant, closer to what the original triangles were before I had to cover them with tulle to facilitate quilting.  Incidentally, I have discovered something which has more recently been confirmed by others (including Susan Carlson), and that my assumption that light colored tulle would be the most inconspicuous is not always true.  As it happens, I probably would have been better with a medium or dark tulle, rather than the beige I used which just had the sad effect of neutralizing/graying out all my colors.  

So here is the flat 2D version.  I got the picture printed on cotton sateen, quilted it, and then finished the edge with a couched yarn.  It's very very flat!  Almost startlingly flat.  In fact, because there's no binding or facing, it's even more flat than my normal quilts.  It's sort of optical illusion-y, because to me it looks quite dimensional.  Perhaps that's because I know what the original looked like, but I still think it's cool.  

Tesseract #2, Shannon Conley, 2018

I like that in some places you can see the original quilting stitches under the new quilting stitches.  Like a mirror-mirror-mirror hall.

I had this one pinned to my design wall sideways to facilitate photography, and I actually think I really like it this way.  I haven't put the pocket on yet because I was waiting to see whether it got into a specific show that required the vertical orientation (it didn't) but I think I might put the pocket on so it can hang in this orientation.

And for comparison sake,  here they are side-by side. It seems a bit eerie actually. 

Tesseract #1 (left) and #2 (right)

The Triangles: Finished!

Earlier in the week I shared my design process for a new dimensional quilt made out of cut up quilted triangles, and today I'm sharing the finished piece.  I call it a quilt, but then I call all sorts of things quilts.

It's named Tesseract, in honor of one of my favorite books as a kid (and now a new movie) A Wrinkle in Time.  I was inspired by the idea that a tesseract brings two points in space closer than you'd normally think they could be.  Of course that was in the fifth dimension and I'm only in the third dimension, but that's ok!

Tesseract, c. Shannon Conley, 2018

Here it is from the side so you can see how it rests on the wall.

Here are some up close details.  When you get up close you can see the tulle a little more.  I love the way the paint didn't sink all the way in around the quilting stitches since the triangles were painted after the quilting was done, giving a textural look to the colors almost like a grave rubbing.  And I also love the quilting stitches themselves.  They're a bit random since they came from whatever piece I cut up, but I love the variety.

I really love the way this turned out.  It's one, unlike the quilt I cut up to make it, which came out like I envisioned in my head.  It feels like a metamorphosis, something flat and ugly turning into something with depth and vibrancy.  I'm actually thinking of doing another two-dimensional piece based on this one to see how much depth I can artificially create by using shadows and quilting rather than sculpting.  

New Project: The triangles

I had been wanting to try some dimensional pieces that were more abstract than my flowers.  Anyone who follows me on pinterest knows I've been pinning lots of abstract sculpture and other three dimensional art.  And so late last year I decided to bite the bullet.  My idea was to take a bunch of quilted triangles, and stitch them down to something with some structure and then "magically" (in quotation marks because I always think these things are just going to work out) sculpt it.

I started with this quilt which I was never very fond of.  I made it for a show last year, and was glad it got into that exhibit, but figured it was ripe to be cut up and made into something new. 

Of course part of the reason I didn't like it was because the colors were so light and bland, so I painted over the whole thing with red and orange and then cut it up in to a bunch of small equilateral triangles.  I also cut up a bunch of quilted leftover bits from the iris, and painted/cut up some practice quilt sandwiches so that I had a giant pile of triangles.  

I decided that I might try stitching them to aluminum window screen as a sculptural base, and below you can see my small mockup.  It's aluminum window screen with chiffon on the front and back and the triangle sandwiched between.  I decided the chiffon was too matte looking, it really blocked the color intensity I was going for, but otherwise sewing over the window screen didn't cause any problems.

I next pinned a full size piece of window screen to my design wall and started pinning up my triangles.  I rearranged and rearranged until I liked them, and then started gluing them down (to the screen) with glue stick.  I needed something that would hold them in place enough for me to get it down on the floor to pin baste, but not so sticky that it would glue the whole thing to the design wall.  The glue stick worked well enough and only a few fell off.

Here you can see it on the floor- the blue tape is holding the background layer of tulle flat on the ground.  Then there's the layer of screen, then the quilted triangles, and then another layer of tulle.  The sides of the screen had selvedge-like things, but the top and bottom were quite pokey.  Fortunately, the weave of the screen helped me keep the triangles aligned.  

This is what the back looks like; basically the "grout" is empty, only screen and tulle.

Next I quilted between each triangle along the "grout" lines so that the triangles were secure and wouldn't shift all over the place.  This was tricky since the screen was a bit hard to maneuver under the sewing machine.  I used clear monofilament thread because I didn't want to see any of the jerkiness in the quilting stitches that I knew there would be due to the weird and hard to handle bulk.

After cutting and finishing the edges, the next step was to work on the sculpting. I played around with different approaches using some equilateral triangle graph paper.  I wasn't trying to get a final design so much as trying to determine what kind of shapes and ways of folding I could generate using these shapes.  It was really fun to play around with this, like a really cool spatial reasoning puzzle.  I love stuff like this.

Finally I started sculpting it myself.  Even though the screen is stiff, it doesn't fully hold it's shape, so everywhere two corners are folded to be touching, there are a few stitches holding it together.  This was a super fun project to work on, and I'll share final pictures on Friday!!

Have you ever done any dimensional work with quilting?  What approaches have you tried?