Last week, I showed you a rack full of silk fabrics that I had painted with various surface treatments. My next step was to iron them to fully set the paints and then begin laying them out into the approximate color progression and design that I wanted. This actually took quite a bit longer than I first thought it would, and when I was "finished", I realized that I wanted the exact opposite orientation than I'd been fooling with.
I used a piece of very thick felt as a work surface. On top of that, I laid out a single thickness of natural cotton batting, which is my preferred quilt middle layer. The felt is a great surface to work on: it's thick enough to just stick pins into to try out various designs, and it can be rolled up loosely with the work inside to move it. When I begin pinning fabrics down to the batting, the pins almost never slip into the felt layer by mistake.
Once I knew which orientation I wanted, I began to tear the fabrics and put them more-or-less in place. I tore most of them a bit wider than necessary so that there would be enough overlap. The silks are thin and somewhat translucent, so overlaps created a nice shaded layering that isn't completely apparent in my photos, but which can be seen in real life quite easily.
One thing that became very clear as I worked was that there were several pieces of fabric "missing" from the mix. Back to painting to fill in the gaps!
Next week, piecing the top.
Part one
Part two
Part three
Part four
Part five
Copyright 2011 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.
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