Progress on the Revelation Quilt

 Earlier in the week I showed the first part of my progress on the Revelation quilt mostly focusing on the text.  Today I'm back to share more of the in-progress pictures.

After assembling all the text, my next step was to start working on the trees.  I loved the imagery of the tree of life from Revelation 22:1-2, talking about the tree of life with twelve fruits one for each month, and the tree of life is for the healing of the nations.  I've always loved tree of life imagery, and I enjoyed picking out all different types of fruits that grow on trees where I grew up or where I am now.  The trees are pretty big, and I built them on big pieces of parchment, starting from the trunk up.  I tried to cut out different shaped fruits and leaves for the different varieties of trees.  It worked fairly well, but all the apple and peach leaves wound up pretty much the same. The trees arch over a central river, so there's one tree/trunk on each side.

The Revelation text talks about the "the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city" but I'm not a city person, I'm a mountain person, so I decided that my river of the water of life should be flowing from the mountain.  I made the background for the trees featuring my home mountains (Sierra Blanca in New Mexico) with a river flowing out from it.  The blue background was originally a silk sari a grad school boyfriend brought back from India, and a long time ago I used it to make a dress.  But the dress never fit quite right so it got relegated to the studio.  I cut up some of the skirt to make the background, that's why it's kind of a weird shape on top.  The mountains and foreground are scraps of upholstery fabric, so up close they have a ton of texture.  The foreground is pretty boring, but I knew the trees would fill up most of the space so I didn't want to make it too busy.

After getting the central imagery (trees/river/mountains) assembled, it was time to work on the borders.  The top border has a large banner saying "The Gifts of God, for the People of God" and above it some gold interlacing. I had a lovely gold brocade I used for that and it came out lovely.  I really like the interlocking designs.

The bottom border had more filigree, and a gleaming starry communion host in the middle since this is a communion kit.  I know it looks sort of like a sun, but it's actually a communion wafer.  I added the alpha and omega and the trinity knots to bring to mind the wholeness of God in the sacrament of communion.

Unfortunately, you can see on the bottom of this picture that my purple fabric wasn't quite long enough, so I wound up piecing in a little scrap when I quilted it.  It didn't match perfectly, but good enough. 

Then to complete the communion motif,  I put tesselating communion chalices up the left and right borders.  

It's quilte large (for me) and quilting it was challenging but fun.  I love the quilting part and I love picking out all the symbols for these liturgical pieces.  Come back later in the week to see the final quilt!