‘Why don’t we make a quilt which is our story?’
Bronze metallic lumiere paint on purple cotton quilting; unfortunately photograph doesn’t show true colour of paint – see below for a better likeness
Ever since then, I’ve been playing around with different paints on pieces of fabric. It took some weeks before I summoned up the courage to just start painting. In the end, I opted for one of the easy options by using the lumiere paint. I didn’t need to put any additives to make it suitable for fabric. Also it had a thick enough consistency that it took to stenciling and freehand painting well where other options bleed. Still, I was tentative about starting.
To mitigate my nervousness I chose an affordable plain purple cotton quilting fabric as the backing.
The tree stencil, Andrew and I chose together. It came from Stencil Kingdom in the UK and it is enormous (over 40 inches wide) but spectacular. The original stencil is wider than it is long, however, in order to suit being part of a quilt, we’ve altered it slightly to reduce the width and increase the length. Much to Andrew’s delight, I volunteered him to do all the freehand joining bits!
The colour here is a better likeness
In return, I got the task of hand-stitching on the black cat in the tree. Mister had a go at hand stitching and after a few moments complained that his hands hurt – a likely story! If anyone is wondering whether this cat is Licorice or Saffron, I can tell you it is neither. The reason for the black cat is that Andrew keeps telling me he needs a black one to go with the white and ginger one. He thinks then he will have one of each colour. Everytime he says this I point out that cats come in more than just 3 colours and our fur family is complete! So, to humour him, I have provided him with a black cat in spirit – or stitch! End of argument.
Of course, Licorice, Saffron, Pickle and Gesso will have to make an appearance somewhere in this collaborative effort. At this stage, Gesso will arrive in the form of a squirrel – one of his nicknames. He’ll be purple as white would stand out too much. I think it’s fine that Gesso is going to be an odd colour. He has painted himself with enough colours to date that he clearly doesn’t want to be white! As there was no way I was going to stitch a squirrel, I’ve ordered one from Applicuts.
As for the other three… well, time will tell how they appear in this piece!
