Finishitup Month

I have always made January my finish it up month. I force myself to revisit the work that I abandoned and try to finish a few pieces before starting a new one. It works sometimes. Often the  piece that I choose to finish requires very little work done to be called finished.


Wolf Pack@2016

This is one of those pieces that I started not last summer but the summer before.  I wanted to try some complicated stencil patterns. I made three different stencils by tracing designs from a patterned tablecloth that I have had for a long time. I used clear plastic-the heavy kind that you can buy at the local hardware store that my mother- in-law liked to use for table cloths. I chose three colours from the multicolour paisley table cloth and  copied one colour on each stencil.


Then I spent my Thursday evenings at the local park listening to music and cutting out the stencils.


When that was finished, I spread a piece of muslin on the table and ironed on three freezer paper cutouts of wolves and a few straight cutouts to represent trees. They will act a resists. Then one by one I place the stencils over the muslin an applied a different colour of acrylic paint to the muslin.
After the paint was dried and heatset with an iron on the back, I layered the muslin over thin quilt batting and a backing.


Machine quilting came next. I quilted the trees heavily with variegated thread. Then just outlined the wolves and did a little bit of quilting inside the trees to look like the forest.
This is where I fell off the wagon for a little while. The quilting was heavy in some areas and very light in others which causes the fabric to pucker in spots. I was not sure what to do about that--so I left it in the to do pile where it stayed for almost a year.


I showed it to my fibre arts group (the Fabrigos) and they encouraged me not to abandon it--just keep going. (that's what I love about the group--lots of encouragement and good suggestions.) They told me to embrace the puckers and so I did. There is no way to avoid them so accept them .


 Well it did sit for another good while but I recently got it out and had another look. Better to have a mediocre finished quilt than an unfinished one in the queue.

Wolf Pack @ 2016 detail

So that's done. All it really needed to finish it was another backing applied(to hide all the bad stuff) and a faced edge and it was done. It took me eighteen months and one hour to finish it up.


Now to the studio!!! more finishing to be done.