Thread Painting

A beautiful sunrise today

and it looked like there were mountains rising behind Barrie Island so I had to take a photo of it!  I wonder if I could translate this into a thread painted image?  After taking a workshop in March with Nancy Prince http://www.nancyprince.com, I tried my first thread painted quilt for the Trend-Tex challenge for Quilt Canada 2016.  The CQA/ACC http://www.canadianquilter.com uses the challenge to raise money for its operating expenses and Trend-Tex donates the fabric that is then cut up into sets of 5 fat quarters.  The current vice-president has that honour, along with the privilege of choosing the theme for the challenge, which was ‘Living a Life in Green’.  Well....that took months of thinking!  You can see most of the challenge items in the CQA/ACC gallery.  From money to ecology to nature and eventually I wandered in my thoughts to the hobbits from ‘The Lord of the Rings’, who certainly lived their lives in ‘green’ in their shire.  After looking through the photos online of the village set up in New Zealand for the movies made from this series, I developed a wall hanging design with aspects of the photos and my own ideas. 

I designed the quilt with EQ7 http://electricquilt.com, layered the fabrics then started embellishing with pieces of photos and then thread.  I made lots of mistakes! I added the borders before I started thread painting.  Well I didn’t stabilize the fabric as well as I should have, so the first set of borders had to be cut off.  Then I finished the thread painting, added new borders and then layered it with wool batting and 80/20.  I heard that some quilters were using the 2 layers and wanted to try it.  The wool batting really ‘puffed up’ the sections, so I ended up doing lots of quilting to hold down parts.  On the first border, I had done bobbin work to print part of the elf language verse:

And for those of you who don’t speak Elvish:

One Ring to rule them all,

One Ring to find them;

One Ring to bring them all

And in the darkness bind them

I did this border twice as I figured out how to actually write the lines using perle cotton in the bobbin.  I tried using paper with the verse written on it (reversed), sewed it from the top with regular thread and then went over the thread with bobbin work.  It was ok, but not great.  In the end, after practising several times on paper with pencil, I just laid out the copy beside the sewing machine and wrote one line at a time.

 The black border has quilted 'flames' on it and is wider on the bottom right because Mordor is in that direction (and if it really isn't, please be kind!  I'm directionally challenged).

You can see that this is definitely a first effort in thread painting, but as I see scenes around me that tempt, I may be thread painting again!  And I did win a first place at the Providence Bay Fair!

Below is the label I put on the back of it - I do all my labels in Electric Quilt 7 because combining photos and text is so easy there and I can do a couple of labels and print them out on one piece of fabric!