Working through some stuff

I am having a really hard time in my personal life right now which has lead to some sleepless nights. The other night at 2 am, I pulled out a large piece of cotton batting and started pouring lots of diluted red textile paint on it which was left over from a bunch of almost empty paint jars. I hate to throw good paint away, so I poured water in the jars, shook it up and poured it on the batting, spreading it around with a big brush. I dumped some purple and russet on there too, covering a 3 foot by 4 foot piece of batting.

It felt good to just pour out all that paint and spread it around, pouring out my anger and grief. Then I grabbed an almost empty bottle of gold, added some water and put it in a bottle with a small hole and squirted the bottle onto the batting, hoping to add in something uplifting like a bit of gold and goodness that could come out of this. I am trying to be optimistic, as hard as that is right now.

In the morning when all was dry, I freely cut big holes with a rotary cutter in a piece of turquoise hand dyed cotton with Mistyfuse on the back, to represent my external calm that I am trying to maintain, but also my sadness with all that watery blue pouring down.

I chalked in some lines for some stitching on the red batting, then I will do some more linear quilting on the blue.

As I work through this piece, I will work through this transition in my life. I hope that I can transform some very negative feelings into ones of hope and beauty and come out the other side in a better place.

Painted Batting

I wrote an article for the upcoming December issue of Quilting Arts magazine on painted batting. The Warm Company wanted to do an ad tying in to the article and wanted to use some of my artwork for the ad. Unfortunately the only painted batting pieces I had were used in the article. I felt bad about this and decided to come up with something they could use in their ad and sent them a photo of this the next morning.

This is 12" x 12" painted batting. There are 9 two inch painted batting squares appliquéd to 9 four inch painted batting squares that are pieced together with a wide zigzag stitch. It is painted with Lumiere textile paints and machine stitched.

If you go to Quilt Market you will be able to see it in the The Warm Company booth. If you go to Festival I will have it with me during my painting demos in Make it U's Open Studios.

Painted Batting

Before I made Lichen I experimented with painting on Warm and natural cotton batting. I wanted to find out what the surface would look like, would it absorb the paint like a sponge or would it sit on the surface. It seemed also like it would make a nice soft surface for embellishing by hand. I have these two, I made a third but sold it at IQF’s silent auction a few years ago (without photographing it first, so I can’t show you it)


I was happy to find that the batting did not soak up the paint like a sponge, and they were easy to stitch and couch on by machine and bead by hand without falling apart.