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See my art
see my silks
my fabric blog-projects
Jim's work
Read my new novel
Watch me write a novel |
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Jeanne's quilt page
Custom design, hand painted |
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A custom designed, hand dyed and hand painted quilt of silk and cotton |
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Designing the quilt |
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This is the room the quilt was desiged to occupy. The client wanted to harmonize with the great deal of wood in the room, and to take advantage of the plentiful indirect sunlight. |
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The first draft design. I had not yet received final measurements of the quilt from the client. She wanted dragons; I suggested dragons chasing each other. I wanted plenty of "white" space in the design, to bring out the complexity of the dragon figures. To make the white space less boring, I decided to use varied colored strips between all panels, which would also serve to hold the design together. |
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In the second go-round, I got measuremens from the client, and showed proposed colors. It's necessary to get the measurements precisely before dyeing and cutting and especially sewing. As little as an inch off the measurement, and you have a useless piece of fabric and have to start again from square one, especially if you're hand-dyeing everything, as in this project. |
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In the third version of the design, the client decided she wanted a water theme as well as a fire theme, so I suggested a central panel of water lilies. In this design, we are still talking about using a circular central panel, which is very troublesome to do. |
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It wasn't until this stage that the client revealed that she intended to fold the quilt and tuck it under pillows at the head of the bed. This meant that the designs for the dragons marching up the side of the quilt had to be capable of laying flat or being folded, and still had to go together. So a redesign was called for. The central panel had to be shifted down, the top of the quilt lost its white space, and I had to redesign the dragons several times to make them fit. |
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At this point I put together various optional quilt designs to give to the client, so that she would see all the various issues we had to work with. Finally we arrived at a concrete idea that I knew would work (because of all the redesigning I had to do, I had tried out models and thought it thru really thoroughly). |
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Dyeing |
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A panel of silk being dyed using the salt technique. |
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Detail of the silk panel. You can see the salt on the fabric, sucking up the dye. |
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The central panel, of water lilies. Note the water spots, which started out accidental and then seemed like a good idea. |
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The quilt was to be slightly larger than a standard queensize bed, so it was necessary to stretch the cotton batting. I did this with masking tape, on my bedroom floor. |
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Putting the quilt together |
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These are the strips of hand-dyed cotton satteen fabric. They were dyed in graduated yellows and golds and russets in order to pull the design together and make a pleasing whole. |
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The back of the quilt was made from three pieces of cloth. It's very hard to get extra wide cotton, so backs are usually pieced together. In an effot to avoid a seam down the middle, they are often pieced, as this one is, in three. Hand died pima cotton. |
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The back was pinned to the batting, and the tape was removed. If everything's not completely flat, there will be puckers in the finished product, so the taping was necessary. |
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Piecing the quilt |
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In the first stage, I sewed the yellow strips around the hand-dyed silk square of water lilies. |
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The second step was to sew on four hand-dyed silk panels around the water lilies. |
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In the third step, strips of gold satteen were sewn on around the silk. |
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After that, the four hand-dyed silk dragon panels were sewn around the center. |
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Next, three lengths of copper satteen went on around the dragons. |
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After that, satteen panels hand-dyed a wheat color were sewn onto three sides of the center. This was to allow for the folds designed into the quilt. |
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The final step in piecing together the front of the quilt was to sew russet-colored hand-dyed satteen all around the center. |
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Next I tacked on batting all around the dragons and water lilies, for a trapunto treatment of these areas. Trapunto is where extra batting is quilted in to make the area more puffy. |
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The quilt is ready to be closed up. You can see the batting on the bottom, the purple backing on top, and the assembled top face down on top of the backing, with the extra batting for the trapunto on top. The next step is to sew all around the outside of the quilt, leaving a gap thru which to pull the inside out, after which the quilting begins. |
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Quilting the quilt |
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Here is the quilt, all packaged up, pinned in place, and ready to start the quilting. I will start, in this case, in the middle. |
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Using freeform quilting techniques, each detail of the water lilies has been outlined. These are the areas with extra batting underneath them, so they will be puffy. |
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This is the back of the area of the water lilies just quilted. The back will show all the details, with none of the colors, of the front. |
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Once the water lilies were quitled, I did echo quilting around the lily pads, extending the lines in ripples right to the edge of the panels with the dragons. |
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Detail of the dragon head. Every scale, every claw, every strand of hair and point of tooth is outlined and padded. |
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Another dragon head, showing detail of the echo quilting around the features |
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The tail of one of the dragons. The design for the dragons was done on heavy silk fabric, using water-soluble gutta and sugar syrup as resists. The surrounding area is dye with salt. |
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Another dragon tail. |
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The dragons were designed to chase one another. I used two different designs, one for the vertical dragons, and one for the ones lying horizontally across the quilt. |
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Another view of head chasing tail. |
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Detail of one of the vertical dragons. |
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Detail of diamond quilting on the white space. |
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The quilt, on the bed at the client's house, and folded over pillows at the head. |
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The quilt in its entirety, folded on the bed. A happy client. |
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i have begun to put up another page with nanother quilting project.
see it here. |
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Materials, mainly from Dharma Trading:
Pima cotton
Satteen cotton
16mm silk
cotton batting
Tinfix silk and Procion cotton dyes
Thanks to Harriet Hargrave for her pioneering work on machine quilting.
I design and make quilts, customized to your specifications. Everything is hand-dyed and hand-painted, and machine quilted. I use only natural fabrics. My quilts are expensive, but totally unique. Please email me with "quilt" in the heading, for more information. |
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