Monday, February 6, 2012

"Weather Forecast" - a 12"x12" Art Quilt

Here is my contribution, "Weather Forecast", to the January Serendipity Art Quilts exchange challenge, "Writing on the Wall".

It's winter and, sure enough, it is "written on the wall" that inclement weather will follow.  The machine appliquéd bird was originally thread painted in brown and beige shades, but because it looked dull on the quilt
background, I overpainted it with blues and then applied glitter glue on the feathers to make it shimmer, as if snow had fallen on its wings.  I stenciled the words from hand cut card stock*, free motion stitched around
each letter and then filled in the letters with glitter glue.  I quilted the piece with continuous freemotion needlework to give it an overall look of falling snowflakes.    To emphasize a snow element a faux pearl bead was stitched into the intersecting lines of each snowflake.  To achieve a binding that blended with the quilt's hand painted background, I used thinned down yellow and blue Setacolor fabric paints, scrunched the fabric
while wet, and set it in the sun to do it's "thing".

* Note about making long lasting card stock stencils:  A long time ago I learned to apply linseed oil to hand cut cardstock to make it durable, but I didn't have any linseed oil on hand.  Instead, I applied 3 coats of
polyurethane after I cut out the letters and it worked famously well.  The stencils that were used on this quilt will now stand up to repeated use without destroying the card stock.


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