Buttons&Beads&Quilts!

While red is one of my favorite colors, it’s not one that I use a lot in my art quilts. However, I had some great red ribbons, fabric, and buttons, so red was the choice for this next one in the series, “Circles of Black, Circles of White 6”. I also began to incorporate industrial zippers as surface embellishments on my work. I had seen the cover art  of Quilting Arts magazine by Diane Nunez on their June/July 2010 issue where she had used large opened zippers to represent stems for flowers. I thought that since I use a lot of flowers in my own work, I would use zippers to suggest stems, too. As you can see in this pic, there are a number of the black and white circles that have been used throughout the series, sitting on top of opened, white zippers. However, I’ve never met a surface that didn’t call for embellishments, so the sides of the zippers were quickly covered with buttons and beads, and now look less like stems than when the piece was not so embellished.

In this close-up, you can see how the sides of the zippers, opposite from the teeth, have had buttons or beads sewn on the them or down the middle. The teeth were particularly hard to sew and bead over wherever fabric overlapped them, as these zippers are the size meant for jackets. The large, gold pulls on the zippers also added a fun element, but I quickly learned that I needed to sew them down them, as hanging freely, they were constantly catching the beading thread whenever I was working near them. The need to frequently stop and untangle sewing threads is an occupational frustration because to the way that I work. The fabric pieces are pinned in place to the quilt surface fabric first. Next come the largest buttons and beads, and then I progressively work my way down to smaller and smaller elements. The last and the largest contributor to the “Time of the Long Sew” is when the seed beads come in. For the most part, I use 10s/11s, 8s, and a few 6s. (The larger the number, the smaller the seed bead.) Using the smallest beads takes 1 hour to cover 1 sq inch, so that makes for LOTS of opportunities to snag the hand sewing quilting thread used to fasten down the beads. Some have suggested that I work in the opposite direction and work from the smallest to the largest elements, but then, a lot of the bigger pieces wouldn’t lay flat, and I would have beaded under them for nothing, as those beads wouldn’t be seen.

This detail photo is about 1/2 the size of the actual objects. Here I deliberately left some of the original fabric unbeaded, which gives a puffy halo around the black and white circle. I do like to leave some of the fabrics showing in their original state, so people can see what it originally looked like. In the lower left, is a shiny, silver glass button from Czechoslovakia. It’s those glass buttons that always attract the most attention, because of the layers of colored glass, and foil backings and inserts. In the very bottom middle is a starburst metal stamping. I fastened them down first with plastic thread and then covered that up with embroidery floss. While these are cleanly stamped pieces, with no apparent rough edges, over time, the vibrations of the earth and gravity pulling downwards on a piece hanging on the wall would cut the emboridery floss if that were all that was holding these large stampings in place.

The white industrial zippers are more evident in this photo. What was really fun to work with was the red brocade ribbon with metal grommets seen here on the right edge and left middle of this photo. If you click on this link to InterContinental Trims, and scroll about 1/3 of the way down the page, you can see the red ribbons with the grommets in their unembellished state. I added a circle of glowing yellow-gold beads around each hole to emphasize it. By the way, if you’re looking for ribbons at a great price and with fantastic service, the owner of the above mentioned company,Rosita Pisarchick, is the person to know.

So, a few thousand pieces added and the 6th in the series, but the third to be completed, was ready to start photographing and putting it out for exhibitions. I was really getting tired of the red, purple, and gold beads near the end that were used in the background,  ut then that’s always the case with a piece as I get near the end of its completion. For that reason, I can’t believe that I actually did a series of large quilts, all with the same black and white fabric, but when i set my mind to something, I can be really, really stubborn.

 Have you ever set your mind to a creative endeavor? What were your trials and tribulations, and any insights you gained as to how you work?

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You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com

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