Fading Footprints Quilt
I haven't posted in a while but I thought I would share my latest project. I started my Fading Footprints quilt earlier this year and just finished in December. I can’t sit inside during the summer months at my sewing machine so I took a long break off. Last year, when I was finishing another art quilt project, I thought my next quilt should be endangered animals.
I initially debated a while about how to do them. I knew I want finished 10x10” blocks that surrounded a large center panel with some borders. I eventually decided to sketch/paint the animals on the fabric.
My process was the same for all 19 animals. I would lightly sketch the animal with minimal detail then I painted them. I used Tsukineko all-purpose inks and since I was doing this on fabric I had a lot of bleeding and wicking of the ink so I had to really take that into account when painting. They also worked better if the fabric was wet otherwise it would just soak right in and not blend. I also had to let each layer dry before going onto the next but I got them done fairly quickly. I could do two animals a day except for the center. That took me a full 2 days to complete.
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After I painted them, they looked okay but still kinda flat. So I decided to thread paint them with embroidery thread to help the animal stand out a bit. I didn’t do much in the backgrounds on most of them because I wanted people to look at the animal and focus on them. Some animals are not thread painted at all. That’s mostly because I didn’t want to mess up my painting. Basically, I did thread painting where I thought it needed it the most.
I was also terrified to work on the center rhino but it looked too flat. So I eventually, took a deep breath and started working with dark colors first working my way up to the lightest. Again, I just focused on the animal, specifically the face, since that’s where most people look.
I imagined the rhino would have tall gasses in front him and a tree going up the side and across the top of the animal. So I took some fabric and batting and started to draw some tall grass shapes with a frixon pen. I then quilted all the grasses and painted them with my Ink tense pencils. I did the same with the tree and limbs but I used my inks. I also painted more fabric for the leaves using some oil paint sticks, and used that fabric for some embroidered appliqué leaves.
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After I got the animals painted, I decided I would go ahead and paint the sashing that was going to go between the pictures. Since all the animal backgrounds are different colors but primarily blue, green, brown and a few grays, I decided the sashing could be those same colors and kind blend into the other colors. I didn’t want to try to find different fabrics that fit the bill so I thought, “I’ll just paint the sashing.” So I got the inks back out and painted the sashing.
Next, up was the borders. I thought I’d have different footprints of animals in the borders that would go from dark (more prominent) to light (less prominent) in the hopes of mimicking footprints that are fading. I wound up painting the fabric and drawing the footprints since that just seemed like the easy way at this point.
And while I was painting that fabric, I figured I’d just go ahead and paint enough fabric for the binding in various shades of blue.
I also decided to try some fusible batting between the backing and top. I was hoping to keep my backing fabric straight on the back since I always seem to get a big wrinkle and I only see it after I’ve sewn it all together. I used Hobbs fusible batting and it worked like a charm. I really liked that it wasn’t a hard fuse. I could reposition the top/back if necessary and smooth things out. It held everything in place while I did some stitch in the ditch around the sashing and not a pin in sight.
After I put the binding on, I used a fusible tape to hold the binding to the back. It took a while to fuse that clear around the quilt but it held perfectly and again no pins. Win win in my book.
I made my quilt label next. Since this is an art quilt, its a little bigger than most. In addition to my personal info and quilt title, I wanted to let people know some stats about the black rhino (center panel) and a quote about conservation from David Attenborough seemed appropriate, as well as a list of all the animals I featured. I even had enough sashing left over to put around the quilt label. The quilt measures 68x78.
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