Eclipse- Finished

Last week I shared the initial steps of my new, largely hand stitched, quilt.  Here's the finished piece,  I think the color variation in the underlying fabric combined with the stitching and the paintsticks really combines to make something cool looking.  I was initially worried that it would look flat, but I don't think it does!

One of the big challenges is that the back of the piece had lots of threads and knots, more like the back of an embroidery (mine are never tidy) than the back of a quilt.  I didn't want a layer of opaque fabric covering the back, but I needed something, just to hold in all the loose threads.  I decided to fuse down a layer of tulle on the back. Then I added a little bit of machine quilting before blocking and finishing the edges.  The edges are finished by zig-zag couching several layers of Ricky Tims razzle dazzle thread.

My goal from the beginning was to achieve a formal sort of Art-Deco inspired look.  My original idea was New Mexico weather- the rain and sun out at once.  But the longer I worked on it with the dark background and especially after I added the painstick shadowing around the top sun structures, the more it reminded me of an eclipse,  where there's the glowing ring around the sun, and darkness throughout, so I've decided to name it Eclipse.

Eclipse, c. Shannon Conley, 2021, 43 x 31, Photo: Mike Cox

Eclipse, c. Shannon Conley, 2021, 43 x 31, Photo: Mike Cox

Eclipse, c. Shannon Conley, 2021, 43 x 31, Photo: Mike Cox

In addition to the actual bottensöm embroidery, I stitched on lots of beads in the open spaces.    In person the quilt is very sparkly.  Mike has some magical method of capturing the sparkliness in pictures.  Comparing this one and the one below it, it's amazing the difference that the camera settings make.

Eclipse, c. Shannon Conley, 2021, 43 x 31, Photo: Mike Cox

 I really love the way this turned out.  It was completely experimental and tons of fun.  

New Embroidered Quilt: Eclipse

A couple of weeks back, I shared my enthusiasm for a new-to-me form of Scandinavian embroidery called Bottensöm.  I enjoyed making my little hoop so much I decided I wanted to use it in a larger quilt.  I've had this semi-sheer black swiss dot fabric in my stash for a long time and decided to use it for the top layer of the piece.  And since I wanted to preserve some of the sheerness, I decided to forgo a batting layer.  Bottensöm embroidery works off of a grid, so I first marked my grid before layering the fabric and starting to stitch.  I decided to use a paralellogram grid rather than a rectangular or square grid for my bottom section and also try some bottensöm on a sitched star pattern (the top two medallions). I'm very new to this so I wasn't sure how it would work, but I marked my fabric and got started.

This form of embroidery pulls on the fabric a fair amount, so normally it would be worked in a hoop.  Since I obviously don't have a quilt sized hoom (this is about 31" x 42") so I decided to layer my fabrics and staple them onto a wooden frame I made out of 1x2 boards.  The top layer is a piece of solid black fabrics, and underneath I have stapled on strips of various other sparkly fabrics.  There's a bright pink metallic, a sheer blue metallic, a dense sparkly gold mesh, and several different layers of tulle. They give a nice color range under the black- subtle color to add some depth. 

Here you can see a the fabrics all layered down and stapled to the frame.

For doing the stitching, I braced the frame between my sewing table and my rolling work table.  I could reach it reasonably well from either side, the trickiest part was the very middle; my arms didn't like reaching to stitch quite that far.  You can see here below the layers of grid stitching that form the base for bottensöm.  For all the stitching I used pearl cotton, thin yarn, Ricky Tims Razzle Dazzle thread, and any other heavyish thread/embroidery stuff.

In bottensöm, each place the grid lines crossed is stitched over with a cross stitch, you can see I've started that here.  On the inner rings where I won't do any additional stitching I added small beads to my cross stitches.

Here you can see what it looks like after starting the pull-across stitches that make the distinctive bottensöm look.

After I finished all the stitching I added a bunch of Shiva Paintstik to enhance the stitching design.  

After finishing all the stitching, I carefully pried up all the staples and removed the piece from the frame.  I added a little traditional machine quilting around the borders and then just finished up the edges.  Come back later in the week to see the finished piece!