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Expectations. The quilt top is on the design board. Your daughter says she likes this one best. It is calm and restful. And now you need to figure out how to quilt it without ruining that feel!

I’m finding that Ikea frames make an inexpensive and fun way to set off these quilts for displaying.

This was another one that required a seam ripper … the aqua under the circles was too edgy the first time and needed to be redone. Ended up a very similar color thread but with extended match-stick quilting and the grass-like quilting in the aqua. I love it now. The subtle changes in direction and addition of a slight purple color adds interest to the center of the circles. And, as always, the final tone-on-tone stitching that drew the circles out into the border adds the icing on the cake. Yeah!

Sometimes the final quilting is the hardest part. I enjoyed using multiple colors of quilting on the four. Then it was time to finish the circles … the variegated thread worked well, and looks good drifting into the rust. And yet, when I tried to finish the final circle I was creating in the rust it took two tries. The first time looked awkward. Enter the seam ripper. Second try was the charm.

“Infrastructure 5”

This quilt was inspired after I found a telephone pole buried in the woods. The pole had tall numbers on it that had been worn away. The rusty color echos the metal tags that were also nailed to the pole. The circles remind me of the phone wires coiled overhead. Reminders of a fragile crumbling and yet functioning infrastructure.

See all six Lenten Forms 2016 in the Lenten Forms 1-6 post.

Layers of interest … “Infrastructure 4” definitely has them.

From far away the color blocking is fairly stark, but get up close and personal and the red stitching around the discharged circles begins to pop and contrasts with the turquoise in the center. And the “drip” marks through the large area of drunken circles turn out to be colorful streams that echo the bold colors on the left. (Thanks to Kelsey @lovelyandenough for the drunken circles stamp that I used to print this fabric and Leslie Keating who organized the hand-printed fabric swap that inspired it.)

If you look closely, I straight-line stitched along the bottom of the drunken circles in a light turquoise … you almost never notice it, but it adds a nice little extra touch of life.

See all six Lenten Forms 2016 in the Lenten Forms 1-6 post. 

This quilt top was made up of two different fabrics that I printed. The outer fabric was dyed rust and overprinted using a rubbing technique over strips of foam that had circles cut out of them. The inner fabric was dyed yellow, then a flour resist was applied, and I dyed it dark gray. I used a discharge medium that is heat activated to define the overall circle. Below you can see the first iteration … it took several to get the final result as I’m a novice at the discharge game!

pieced and in progress quilt tops on the design board; lower left quilt top with first discharge

the final discharge result & almost done quilting

and complete!

the discharged section and quilting up close and personal

The free-motion quilting was a challenge around the circle. In the end, by using fairly graphic colors that stayed with the discharge patterns I set up a nice flow around the circle. I embellished the outer edge a bit to draw the circle out, using a navy color thread in the lower left corner to contrast with brick red color I was sewing on.

Lots of energy and interesting color in this piece – Infrastructure 3. I see a contrast between pipes with unnoticed flow and a large conduit of rushing storm water or maybe even a storm pattern.

Sometimes the last 10% is the hardest part!  These quilts have been living on my design board, calling out for quilting for quite a few months. Finally, with a little extra time over the Christmas holidays I decided it was time to finish the last four of the quilts I started last February.

Yikes! The weather was bitter, but the photographs of the quilts sure pop.  I photographed on top of my compost bin because it was so cold out and I wasn’t enjoying venturing too far.

Lenten forms 2016

Here are my six Lenten Forms quilts. All the fabrics were hand dyed and printed with fiber reactive dyes. I experimented with resists, printing, and some discharge and overprinting of pieced quilt tops. The idea of infrastructure fascinates me… the invisible structures for water, gas, and electricity. We expect it to work all of the time, but sometimes the lines and flow are more chaotic than expected.

I have posted about the Lenten form 1 and Lenten form 2 previously, but here are all six in the series. Hopefully I’ll find a few moments to post a little bit more on each quilt with some close-ups, but for now I’ll enjoy (and I hope you do too) seeing the completed 16″ squares.

Infrastructure 1

Infrastructure 3 Infrastructure 6

Infrastructure 2

Infrastructure 5

Infrastructure 4

First “finished,” but second Lenten forms quilt that I’m deciding is actually done. I finished the free-motion quilting some time ago on this quilt, but as I kept looking at it on the wall it seemed as if the quilting was taking away from the overall large composition, so I took out my seam ripper and got to work.

I used several manipulations of the fabric after initial printing for this quilt. The large yellow circle was discharged using a Dharma discharge paste (that they no longer carry) activated by heat (sunlight or iron). To get the aqua lines down the center of the quilt I used a flour resist dyeing technique on only the central portion of the quilt.

flour resist applied to quilt top

turquoise dye applied over flour resist

 This is the quilt with most of the free-motion stitching done. You can see the tree or root-like free motion stitching that goes all across the one end of the quilt. This was the part that bothered me, so I ended up removing all the roots that didn’t start inside the black fabric. I love the simpler quilting and am finally calli

extra stitching to remove: parallel lines and roots to the left

Here is the finished quilt, called “Infrastructure 2” nestled into my side garden alongside my driveway and with a few others in the series.

“Infrastructure 2”

Forms of Lent quilts

See all six Lenten Forms 2016 in the Lenten Forms 1-6 post.