Slice Quilt Finished-Almost

My Wayne Thiebaud slice quilt is done except for some final quilting and a hanging sleeve. My group met last night for the reveal-what a thrill! I forgot my camera and phone so no photos of the assembled quilt-ugh. It will show in 2 weeks and I will have photos then.

My Slice Mates made me feel quite humble-I think the final assembled quilt is fabulous. I am much more pleased with what I learned than I am with my slice.I will go back and quilt in the major elements of the design to nail them to the backing, but I wanted to wait and see how it hung with the others before doing this. Hence the lumpy hang-that will be fixed.Just to refresh your memory, this was the part of the painting I was to interpret.

My group met before the reveal to discuss our experience. We all agreed that we were fairly whiny and annoyed much of the time-it was difficult, outside of our comfort zone, no idea how to represent some of the elements, etc. Yet we all also agreed that no matter how we felt about our product, we learned a lot from the process.I learned that thread painting is NOT my favorite thing to do. It is tedious, takes a ton of thread and takes forever to do the smallest of elements. I also learned I have few skills in the painting arena of art and I could benefit from some painting classes. The other Slicers were much more experienced and schooled in painting, shading, etc. and that was evident to me when we all hung together. I also learned that no matter how cool your slice is, it is fairly uneventful hanging by itself! You do all this work and you’re left with this uneventful slice. One of the harder areas for me was this very dark tree in the foreground. I ended up using black batting for this and then thread painting the heck out of it to add texture, dimension and color. I could not get this to photograph well.

One of the most successful parts of this piece is something I didn’t even do-the background fabric custom dyed for me by Marti Meadows-it beautifully captured the essence of the original painting. Dying is something I leave for professionals!To construct this quilt I did all of my work on a sandwich of front, batting and very stiff stabilizer. Since the back stitches would not show I used any old bobbin I had lying around, so you can see all the random bobbin colors here on the back. This fairly diminutive project took 12 bobbins in all! I finished the back by “pillow casing” a sturdy cotton to the front and then turning it through an opening. Because the front of the quilt was so darn stiff and the back so soft, I had to understitch the backing by hand and catch all of the layers except the front to keep the backing from rolling forward. This was incredibly difficult on my hands and I am thankful that I have no arthritis–yet.

So, I am not at all particularly happy with the final product but I am thrilled about what I learned from the process. Ya know, not everything turns out to be something you’re really proud of.

To quote from my favorite art book, Art and Fear, “The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.” That then was the purpose of this work-to teach me what I needed to know more about and what I don’t like to do. Done.