Pam Geisel Art Quilts: Northern Lights

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Northern Lights - Project Quilting

"Northern Lights" 20" x 10", made for Project Quilting, Season 5, Challenge 4: Across the Universe, Feb. 2014

Challenge recap for "Across the Universe":

Use the theme "Across the Universe."

While I was thinking about this challenge, it occurred to me to do something with an image of the milky way, but last fall I made "My Very Educated Mother Just Said Uh-Oh, No Pluto" so I wasn't ready to revisit that. I was looking at some photos of the universe, and one reminded me of photos of Northern Lights.

Ever since I made "Mountain Mist" for last year's Project Quilting, I'd been wanting to make another fabric mosaic similar to that one but with Northern Lights. I decided to make a companion piece to "Mountain Mist" so that meant this one would be the same size. Luckily I already had the frame.

The first thing I did was sort through the hand-painted fabric I have to pick a piece that looked like a sky that could have Northern Lights in it. The I played around with some mint green wool roving and two different colored yarn. The yarn on the left was multi-colored but wasn't twisted very much so I combed it out to make it looser, more like the roving. The yarn on the right was also multi-colored but it was twisted pretty tight.

Once I decided on placement, the roving and the first yarn were lightly fused to the backing fabric using MistyFuse. The tighter yarn was couched to the background (you can see the stitches in the photo).

I cut out the tree silhouettes then stitched them to the background. I put netting over the whole thing (to help hold the roving and yarn in place) and stitched it to the background. Then I added another row of tree silhouettes. I used the same black fabric for all of the trees so you can see how much the netting lightens the color that's behind it.

Finally I matted and framed it but I decided to leave the glass out of the frame so it feels more like a fiber piece.