Progressions

Please pardon the repetition (especially since all our snow has been gone for a while), but you’ll understand my reason for repeating this image as you continue to read. Back in January I put a photo at the top of one of my posts that showed a progression of snowy days.

This could have been the subject of my most recent art quilt, but I already had that quilt almost completed when the multi-day blizzard occurred.

The ThreadBenders current challenge theme is Progressions, and here are the rules:

“The quilt must be a triptych made of 3 panels, each 16″ wide and 31″ long, all sewn onto 1 black sleeve with 2″ between each panel. The theme is a “progressive quilt”, so that your idea “progresses” from one panel to the next.  For example, a pair of hands, first young, then middle aged, then old.  Or a seed, then a flower bud, then the fully open flower. 

The outside edges of the 2 outer quilts, and the tops and bottoms of all the quilts will have binding. All the vertical inside edges will be faced. The binding must be 1/2″ wide in a solid color, but not black.”

We usually shy away from intensely detailed instructions because artists don’t like too many rules. But this idea was so intriguing the group decided it needed to be spelled out well. Some of the artists struggled to come up with examples other than the ones used. When I was telling our grandson Trey about it he immediately said “oh you mean like a tree with orange and red leaves in the first quilt for fall, then a dead winter tree next, and a tree with leaves after that”. He got it! After a great discussion the others in the group did too ~ and the end results are fascinating. To see all the quilts in the challenge click here!

My quilt is entitled “Storms Coming… Rain… Puddle”. It was inspired by two photos I have in my “inspirations” folder that had a similar theme ~ rain. I love to use the camera on my phone, and last July I did a post about some of these pics (click here for that post). The first was taken while riding around on our pontoon boat.

It was a bright sunny day and we’d been out floating on the lake for a while ~ facing south. At one point we turned to the north and this was what we saw! Storms Coming! I grabbed my phone and caught the rainbow and the seagull before we hurried back to the cottage (we made it before the rain came – whew). I decided this would be the first of my panels.

The next photo was taken as I was heading north on the road where we used to live, on a rainy afternoon. As I came to the stop sign at the end of the road, I was enthralled by the image the windshield wipers were creating.

Could I make these photos into quilts? And what would be the third panel in my progression? I found an image by Stefan Holm on the web that completed the trio perfectly ~ “Puddle“:

So I reoriented everything to fit the challenge, and had the images printed on fabric through Spoonflower.com. Here are two of them cropped, resized and ready for printing:

Next it was time to add my artistic flair to each panel. I began with “Puddle”, since that seemed the simplest. A pattern was traced onto Glad Press and Seal™:

Two layers of a sheer fabric were fused together,

cut to fit each light area on the pattern:

fused in place, covered with tulle, layered with batting and a back, and then quilted.

I enjoyed the entire process. Next I jumped into “Storms Coming”. It started with cutting and fusing layers of differing values of sheer fabrics for the clouds.

I really didn’t think it was working very well, but a friend came over and raved about the clouds when she saw it hanging on my design wall. This urged me on (we need our quilting friends – thanks Kathy!) She suggested the rainbow be made with sheers too. I was beginning to like it at this point, and fused the gull in place too.

Lines of rain needed to be quilted in. I spaced the first few out to avoid puckers,

then I filled more in and quilted the rest of the piece:

Lastly I tackled the windshield. The tree and autumn leaves were fused on in dark fabrics. I marked where the wiper would go, then layered and quilted it all. Each of the raindrops on the windshield were quilted around also. I did it in this order so the trunk, branches and leaves would all have texture under the fused white organza “windshield”, which I then placed over the rainy portion.

Now – how was I going to make the raindrops? I ordered a number of different dimensional gels (the stuff that makes fake raindrops on silk flowers), and found the one made by Mod Podge™ to work best on a sample piece. It filled the areas nicely.

But when it dried the raindrops allowed the dark fabric to show through so intensely that it looked like a tree with the measles.

Oh no! I was not happy! I chalked it up to trying new things because it doesn’t always work out the way I envision it should. I couldn’t figure out what to do to fix it, so I chose to fuse the windshield wiper in place anyways (using parchment paper as a pressing cloth). I was thrilled to discover that where the iron touched the gel drops they got a bit fuzzy and less dark. Melting the gel by ironing over the entire piece definitely helped reduce the shininess, and lightened most of the drops enough to make me happy. What a fortunate accident!

Some areas remained a bit dark, but I was pleased with the results.

The quilting was finished and all three panels were ready for facing/binding. That step in itself was a bit tricky, and so I’ll save it for next week’s post. Stay tuned ~ I think you’ll enjoy it!