It seems the quilts I'm making recently are expressions of the moment, things I cannot verbally express as well as I'd like, or things I'm trying not to think about. So it goes. I had a vision of darkness surrounding brightness, and I'm not sure when the title came to me, but it came early on: The Plague. The Fire. The Fall.
I'd been wanting to explore reverse appliqué since I'd been alerted to molas (reference in my blog post here), and a friend had given me an authentic one for my birthday. This seemed the perfect method for my vision. I pieced some different fabrics together and basted black cotton over the pieced panel, like the black-crayon over multiple colors "black magic" technique we did as kids. I drew chalk outlines, and snipped into the top layer with extra sharp embroidery scissors.
Then I began to pin and sew around the edges, hemmed under, with variegated stitching showing. (Yeah, I counted. There are 90 of these leaf/eye/flame shapes.)
All of the under layers were hand dyed (moss green), including the red velvet down the center (maroon). It took a little shifting around until I realized the side panel needed to be all one piece, with a cotton line like a vine and beaded flames or abstractions. The binding is that lovely woven Japanese taupe cloth with which I am currently infatuated.
For this particular quilt, touch is very important: the raised edges of the appliqué, the bumps of stitching, the little wells of velvet, the rough woven bands of the binding, the smooth hard beads. It is hard to capture in a flat photo.
This is where I am. That's all I got for now.
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