SAQA Donation Quilt-187 Bald Men in the Rain

It’s that time of year to create my annual donation quilt to one of SAQA‘s major fundraisers, the Benefit Auction. Artist members are encouraged to create 12″ square quilts that will be auctioned off starting Sept 16. This is an excellent time to get fabulous art to add to your collection. View the quilts here-there are already many gorgeous quilts and not all of them have been posted yet.

My finished quilt-tada:

This is a sateeen whole cloth quilt with wool batting and silk thread. The title comes from the number of visible “dots”. To me they look like an aerial view of bald men sitting in an arena of sorts.  The title was approved by dear Hubby who is, by the way, follicle challenged. The center stitching looked like raindrops hitting on a puddle, hence the name. I should have gotten a better photo before I sent it. I was up against a deadline…as always.

There were a few detours along the way. You KNOW it’s never a direct path to the final piece! I started here. It was not yet completed. I would have added tiny black binding around the flower panel and faced the white edges on the larger underlay.

You may not see it well from the photo, but I got little bits of paint on the white which ruined it-rookie error. I am very new to painting on fabric and this is the first time I actually painted on a real quilt. I’m pretty happy with it except the paint bobbles. I have taken Judy Coates Perez‘s classes twice, so ya think it’s about time I tried it for real?

My first try on the bald men theme was a bust. The value of the thread color I chose was much too dark and showed every bobble. This plan required double stitching and that really showed with this color. My choice was rip it out or start over. The marking alone on this piece took several hours. But you know it would have been impossible to rip all that out!

Note that because I am stitching on Terial Magic treated fabric, it is very stiff and makes the stitches sit up on the surface. Once you wash the Terial Magic out, the stitches snuggle into the fabric.

Soooo, on to Plan C:

I needed to redraft my piece again. These are the simple tools I used-the RolerRuler was key. It took some math and a lot of time, but the plan itself was pretty simple.

Getting it onto cloth was tedious. I had to redraft directly onto the fabric. I first treated the sateen with Terial Magic to create an almost cardboard-stiff piece to work with. That made marking a lot easier!

I’ve stitched one section so far here. You can perhaps see that the abundance of markings made the stitching a bit tricky at times. The marks would disturb my vision and cause me to mis-stitch at times. But I could not rinse the blue marker out yet-what would have happened if I needed to restitch something?

The view from the back. There is less loft from the batting than I thought, but I figured it was because the Terial Magic was controlling the fabric.

I decided to bury my threads on each circle. A pain? Yes. But really, there would have been too much distracting double stitching if I didn’t. See how “hairy” the surface gets when you are going to bury your knots?

Of course, if there is a hand needle involved, I will produce blood!

Interesting moment here. See how I have stitched the lower and left “circle” area? The ones in back have not been stitched around yet. I think they may actually show more without having background fill around them. I will ponder this thought for possible future projects.

Surface view-love the dimension! I did expect a little more loft though. When the circles got smaller, they faded into the background a bit.

This really gives you an idea of the dimension and the micro stippling. That micro stippling was done with the aid of a magnifying glass-no way could I do it without! And yes, it was excruciating for me to do that much micro stippling. I estimate it took me 30 hours to complete this quilt, not counting the mis-steps with Plan A and Plan B.

I hope you can see the sheen of the silk thread upon the sateen. It’s quiet but beautiful.

Once I had that out of the way, I took a bit of time to play with sheers again. They are a love of mine. I’ve always wanted to fmq on sheers and I think I may have a method that works. NO hooping for me!

I’ll be linking up with Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday-there are always wonderful links for your enjoyment.