I’ve spent the last month working on my piece for Stretching Art and Tradition 14:  Foundations of ___________.  It is now in PA along with the rest of the exhibit, which is spectacular!  I finally got my photos edited, along with the rest of SAT14 and SAT13 (Games Children Play), this evening, so I’m posting my finished pieces.

This is my piece, Doorway Into the Garden, which is another 3-dimensional quilt.  This is the front view, although it’s actually the Garden part of the piece.  I really wanted to create a tree but didn’t leave myself enough time to figure it out.  Maybe next year.

The arch was constructed on a foam core armature which is filled with foam packing peanuts.  I machine quilted 3 different “stone” colored fabrics onto muslin and battling, then cut them to make the bricks.  I machine stitched them to the wool foundation pieces and then pieced the wool together in a weird mix of puzzle piecing and garment construction techniques.

I used up the last of my green leaf trim from Treasures of the Gypsy, taking most of a Saturday to bead it on and bead the flower sequins on.

The shrub is my hand-dyed rayon ribbon beaded to a pear shaped pillow of green hand-dyed cotton. 

The rose bush is constructed the same way as the shrub, with different hand-dyed ribbon and paper roses I got a Michael’s last year.  The monkey grass is two different colors of hand-dyed cotton sewed down the middle and fringed.

The foundation is my green hand-dyed cotton overlayed with commercial rock fabric.  All of that was sandwiched onto 2 layers of batting and I spent 3 hours machine quilting all of the rocks to make the cobblestone walk.  I seed-stitched the green in 3 different colors of perle cotton and then stitched the arch to the foundation.  After beading on the “rocks”, I put my botton on which is two layers of Peltex fused to more green hand-dyed cotton and then I stitched the binding on.  The last thing I did was stitch on the rose bush and the shrub.  Whew!  A Lot of work, but it looks incredible.  It’s 25” tall, by 26” wide at the base, and 12” deep.

Speaking of hand-dyed cotton, I cleaned some of my pieces out of my collection and have listed them in my Etsy shop.  I put in a bunch of fall colors I dyed late last year of Kona cotton.  I also listed more velvets and all of the extra Rayon Satin I had left over from my table at All Dolls are Art 2012.

These are lovely fall colors and all of these pieces have been pre-washed and ironed.  The cottons come in 1 yard pieces.  The satin comes in 1/2 yd pieces.  There is a limited quantity and what is in the shop is all I have.