Normally when I incorporate quilting into the design of a piece of clothing intended for everyday wear, I do the quilting directly on the shell - in this case the body of the skirt. In other words, the skirt itself serves as backing for the batting and the quilt top. But because the shell of this skirt is an extremely open weave, that wouldn't be possible. The three layers of the quilted strip for this project this had to be built and shrunk separately, then attached to the shell.
Earlier I talked about what I wanted to pop on this, and why. So for its quilting I followed the outlines of the Stage 1 flowers and the Stage 2 connecting channels. This is what the final result looked like (flipped onto the backing so you can see it clearly).
Purple thread was used for the piece, something else that's pretty obvious only from looking at the backing. What's uber-cool is when you look at the final result from the top you think I used two different threads to quilt, because sometimes the thread it looks like it's red and sometimes it looks purple. Looking at it, you might have the reaction of o my goodness how she must have suffered quilting this thing with two different threads and be all impressed.
(That reaction has actually happened to me many times, universally from people who do not sew. Depending on who is saying it and what kind of mood I'm in at the time, I let them believe what they want. Exceptions are a kid or an excited newbie sewing person. Them I'll immediately drop with the explainer. So if you're reading this and you are not a kid or an excited newbie sewing person? DO NOT READ THE PARAGRAPH ABOVE THIS ONE, OR THIS PARAGRAPH, OR THE ONE IMMEDIATELY BELOW. YOU NEVER SAW THIS ENTRY.)
What's actually going on there with the fluxing thread is a common optical illusion anybody who sews knows about. Your thread appears to change color depending on the background. That's the reason you're often told to choose a thread lighter than your background, so it will be invisible. But if you don't want invisible thread for your quilting (! boring !) and you want to add another small but fairly significant element to your final piece, you take your swatches to wherever it is you get your thread and lay a bit of the thread you're thinking of using over each swatch. You will instantly see what I'm taking way too many words here to describe. The thread that changes the most against each individual background swatch? That's your guy.
Okay! The super shrinky thing. Think I said this already, but in case not, I
like texture best, and loooove the nubblies that come once a quilted item has been shrunk. No matter what you use for your batting it's gonna shrink a bit...the batting is going to force your top inward into the whole. You need to factor that into your design. Different batting shrinks at different rates. You'll need to experiment. Natural batting shrinks more than man-made batting.
Because I have a feel for how much the fantabulous Warm & Natural brand of batting shrinks - ! lots ! which is one of the reasons I use it - I pin to capture the shrink effect down the road. When I
pin the top of whatever I'm making down on the batting & backing, I stretch it out as much as possible before stitching, and sometimes I will create false folds or nits in the top in hopes of creating extra nubbly.
Anywho, off it goes to the 24-hour drug dealer laundry, to be twice washed and twice dried at super hot. Super hot in order to get super shrinky. Though it is quite probable that two cycles are not necessary to get super shrinky, I convinced myself otherwise so long ago that this is what I do. I get a lot of reading done at the laundry.
Back home, iron, slash it into the final shape needed for the binding. Even though this is something to be worn and not an actual quilt, you still need to square it off and bind it. I didn't take any pictures during this stage because the slashing is traumatic - doubly so in this case due to the deadline. If you and your rotary fuck up during this stage the result is tears and solace in a big mug of Whaler's. The stories I could tell about how many of my early projects were ruined when it came time to square off. All that drama even though binding is just boring, actually.
For this project the binding was done on machine as opposed to by hand as usual. But truth be told, no matter how you do binding? It's boring. Not to mention traumatic.
Here's up close after slashing to square off, while in the midst of binding. You can see a bit of the super shrinky effect going on. (Compare to the picture above to get an idea of how much you have to quilt of the piece, even knowing you're going to slash it away. The base was 3 flowers wide. The final strip for use is 1.5 flowers wide.) When you see the final piece it will make sense why I bound this in two radically different types of cloth:
Here's up close attaching the piece to the shell. The edge on the bottom of the image also serves as final trim for that entire side of the skirt. Was that hell? Yes. Yes it was. Measure 20 times, cut once:
The blood cloth used as trim was also an extreme open weave. That cloth is also used for the waist and the hem. For the hem what I wanted to do was force the cream cloth of the shell through the loose weave of the blood cloth, thus creating random bits of cream breaking through the blood all around the whole hem. I was only partially successful in that.
Next and (to the relief of some) final entry in this series - why I decided to make a skirt in support of the Interstitial Arts Foundation auction, even though I remain vague on what exactly interstitial means, exactly.
In that post you will be given a link to images of the final skirt, which only three four people have seen so far. I think the IAF pictures are going to better than mine, so I'd rather wait for their hard-working volunteers to do the grunt work and take nice pictures for the auction page that I can just link to.
The IAF auction goes live in November. If you like what you've seen here so far in these series of build notes, take a look when the auction launches and buy it from them. All proceeds from its sale goes to the IAF. Like all of the other creator types supporting this effort, my contribution was created as a volunteer.
Let's end with a picture of Cuddle Kitty getting all up in my way during the quilting stage:
There's a reason all textile ingredient lists around here include the words And Cat Hair.
Note! The final product was run through the wash cycle one more time and taken immediately from there to the post office. So if you have extreme cat allergies, shouldn't be a problem.
Developing.
Source material.
