CHALLENGE: Kathy's March Crayola Challenge

If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.

~Brad Holland

My, oh my, has life gotten in the way of creating.  The last couple of months has been challenging with every minute of every waking hour consumed.  I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel...winter semester of the school year ends in TWO WEEKS!  Yesterday, I could not contain my excitement and made my list of what I want to accomplish this summer; it will only take 58 hours of work per week...OK, maybe I need to trim somewhere!

As I talked in my last post,  the March meeting of my Art Quilt Group meeting brought so many wonderful pieces (you can read about it here). The  March colors were Indigo, Red, Red Orange. I did not get the chance to talk about my own creation, so here it is....

Since I began dyeing a couple of years ago, I have been most excited about dyeing velvet for projects.  I have a dream of a velvet swing coat...but that will be another day. I decided that the March challenge would be a great month to play with velvet.  Luckily, I had the three Crayola colors readily available in dyes.  I began with prepared for dyeing velvet and painted areas of each color around the piece.  I sprinkled salt crystals on the (it is supposed to created star-bursts) and dampened the entire piece with a water spray bottle to get the dye flowing. I was not impressed with the salt effects, but the rest was just what I needed.

 I drew a fleur-de-lis inspired pattern on the piece. I created a quilt sandwich using double thickness of a high loft batting, the velvet top, and muslin bottom. Yes, I said, double thickness of high loft batting and yes, it was VERY thick going under the machine for the first time. I sewed the outline of the pattern and then I thread painted to my heart's content.

As you can see below, I completed a very dense machine thread painting using the three Crayola colors.

When the thread painting was completed, I stuffed additional batting into each relief section. I ran into the difficulty of the backside was equally mountainous as the front. Using my regular quilt batting, I created this cut-out shape below to help level the back.

 I then used the excess top velvet to self bind the quilt.

 Here are some close-ups.... 

And alas, the final piece.  I am very pleased with the final work.  I have experimented with two additional pieces that I will share in a later blog....

Remnants

There are so many fun and helpful bits that I would like to share,  I am creating this last bit of my blog each week,  My hubby, Mark, came up the the name of this section, Remnants, so named perfectly as its definition is: a remaining, usually small part, quantity, number, or the like.

My first remnant is the announcement that Pokey (Patricia) Bolton has decided to leave Quilts, Inc! and as she states, "I am ready for a break after a lot of change in my life the past few years."  A you probably know, Pokey is the founder/creator of Quilting Arts and Cloth, Paper Scissors among others.  She has inspired so many of us in our quilting and mixed media journeys.  I wish her the best!

You can read more about Pokey's bucket list for the next phase of her life here:

Pokey's Bucket List.