My goodness but I am back again....

Will wonders never cease?  I spent a full day in the studio.  Arrived, and studied the blue strips hanging on the design wall.  I wanted to be finished with stitching strips....I love to work in a collage method and doing the sewing of 60" strips gets a little tiresome....

But, the piece wants to be bigger so bigger it got! It is now about 60 x 92" or something like that....

 

The only problem of doing something that big is having enough fabric around to do the backing in the same size.  Most of the time I dye about one yard of fabric and then end up cutting out parts of it....I dug deep into one of my bins and came out with enough fabric to piece the backing

 

Got that all sewn up and then ironed which was a major chore as it was hot in my studio and my ironing table is only 24 x 48" and my floors get really dirty.  Lots of road dirt and dirt off the overhead rail lines outside my studio create a problem....no matter how often I sweep!

So, once ironed and the big table cleared off, I lay out the backing, pulled down the big roll of cotton batting and plopped it down.  The trick is to get the batting cut to the right size and then layers correctly onto the backing without any wrinkles....of course, working by myself gets a little challenging to get things straight....couldn't pull anything but had to life gently into the air and let it float down....and then got the top on  

 

I had hoped, before coming in today, that I would get to the sewing part but that just didn't happen.  Had too much other sewing to do on the front and the back.  Ah well, it gives me more time to think about what it is that I am going to do.

Lest you think that I just make up everything as I go, let me assure you that I have been thinking about this piece for some time.

I love the work Deidre Adams but until I had actually seen her work in person, I had no sense on the depth of her work and the complexity. Of course, she stitches a number of various pieces of fabric together, frequently using a zigzag stitch and then paints the work.  There are layers of paint. At places you can see the original fabrics which add even more depth. But as much as I admire her work and would love to create work like hers, if I did it wouldn't be my work.  The problem is that her technique is so much a part of her voice in the creation of her work.

 So the feeling that I would like to paint a quilted piece will have to remain just that. Lately I have been doing work that is very heavily quilted and calls for further surface design.  I have one piece that I have painted a few of the circles in that have been stitched and I like the effect.

However, I have another idea of what to do once the quilting is done....

well, you just have to wait....