Apologies for this dull, hard to read, grey text. I seem to have lost the ability to change font color.
This was a stab at an art quilt. My friend Carole Harston painted this a few years ago, and I’ve always drooled over it.
Transitions, by Carole Harston
40″ x 30″
My fabric choices. Love this part. I added a few others along the way, but only a few. Most of these were used only once or twice in each panel.
I decided to break my work into 3 panels, each one 12″ x 27″. I had a color copy made, and then covered the sections of the photo I was NOT working on.
I pieced small wedges of fabric together. I did not used any backing as I sewed (no muslin, no batting).
Second panel (above)
So these were the 3 panels, untrimmed. Next step….the longarm.
Then I finally got to trim them. It’s really hard to resist trimming up to this point.
Finally, I stood back to see the almost end result.
I tried to tell myself that I was imagining the issues with the left panel. I slept on it, even looked at it from afar:
Couldn’t take it. SO! It went in for major surgery: (at which point I learned that I STILL should not have trimmed the panels yet)
Now, I am NOT very skilled at art quilts to begin with. To say I knew how this was going to be put back together would be very generous. But I did know that I could just make the entire panel again if I had to. (not my first choice)
In the above photo, you can see the newly created section. It looked like it was gonna be much better on the eyes. Now to sew it together. First, I picked out 3 rows of longarm quilting from the top and bottom sections. Next, I cut a piece of batting to fit in there, and fused it to the edges of the original batting, using fusible batting tape. (photo below)
This is when I realized I had no plan to sew a new piece of backing on. It gets a little sketchy here. I cut a piece of backing fabric that was the exact height, plus 1/2″. I pressed the top and bottom 1/4″.
I applied this double sided tape I have (Atemto Double Sided tape .1 inch) to the folded edges.
This tape isn’t for sewing, I’m sure. I really didn’t care at this point. I had made peace with the fact that the back was not going to be perfect. I flipped the blue fabric and finger pressed it onto the existing backing fabric.
Next, I took the panel to my regular machine and quilted it with straight lines as I had done on my longarm.
This (above) is after I trimmed it. You can see the flaw. I totally chose to pretend it was not there, and carried on.
I applied facing to the panels instead of binding.
SOOOO much better! I am so glad I dove in to the reconstruction. I’ve named it ‘At the End of the Day’. And here’s why. Aside from the fact that it DOES LOOK like the end of the day, I get so annoyed by any new and unnecessary verbage, or lingo, or slang, that pops up into our language. When my kids were young, and started saying “like” 3 times in every sentence, I was all over them. To no avail, of course. Over the past year, while listening mostly to news interviews, I’ve noticed the majority of responses to questions start with “So,….blah blah blah”. As in, question: “Explain what will happen next in the hearings.” Answer: “So, the normal process is…blah blah blah”. Why??? There are others, (…’to be clear’) but to cut this short, how many times a day do you hear the phrase “…and at the end of the day, blah blah blah”? It’s out there all day long. It becomes so trite and unoriginal, it grinds on my nerves!!
I am hopeful that when I hear that phrase in the future, I will refocus on this beautiful painting and the fabric work that was inspired by it, and experience calm.
Long post. But, to be clear, at the end of the day, I thought it was an interesting process.
Thanks for checking in!
Debbie