Thorns and Spikes-Lantern Flames

My mom recently started up a small art quilt group centered on people in the Four Corners region.   It's pretty new, but our first call for entry was titled Thorns and Spikes.  I immediately thought of all the quilts I've made that incorporate aluminum window screen and how scratchy and annoying it was to work with that.  I wondered whether I could incorporate that as "spikes" somehow in my piece. 

After displaying my large flowers at the NM Capitol in 2018, I decided to cut up the Bromeliad piece because I just wasn't happy with the overall shape of that one.  Since it was one that had incorporated the aluminum window screen, I figured now was the time to repurpose some of it into something else.  The original piece had a layer of painted velvet as the front, then a layer of batting, then a layer of window screen, then the backing fabric all quilted together.   One of my goals in this piece was to at least partially expose the spiky edges of aluminum, so I started by cutting out flame shapes, and then carefully picking out the quilting along the edges.  I then trimmed away the front fabric, batting, and backing fabric, leaving only the windowscreen showing.

Fort the background, I found this pale yellow gold shawl scarf thing that had bunches of pleats sewn into it with gold elastic.  I have no idea where it came from, but I loved the texture.  I stretched it out to the required width (20") and fused it to some leave-in interfacing before painting it and quilting it.  The last step was stitch on my five spiky thorny flames!  I picked areas out of the original quilt to cut up that had subtle color variations and quilting variations, and I love the way it turned out.  The binding is maroon velvet,  and in case anyone is wondering, yes it is a very dumb thing to try to make binding out of.


Here you can see me cutting out flames from the disassembled bromeliad quilt.

Those are my "quilting" gloves,  very grippy!  This is the piece mid-quilting, after stretching and painting.

Lantern Flame, c. Shannon Conley, 2020, 30" x 20"

Unfortunately, these pictures had to be submitted by a March 31st deadline (yes I am VERY behind blogging), and of course I didn't finish until two days before.  With the social distancing coupled with Mike's recent knee surgery, I wasn't able to have Mike take my pictures.  He lent me his camera, but even so my pictures aren't nearly as good as his are.  Oh well!  Here are some closeups.

Here you can really see the spiky metal edges sticking out!  One nice thing about the shapable window screen is that this piece can be rolled for shipping and subsequently "fluffed up" in contrast to the kirigami quilts which just aren't flexible in that way.