Bad Rain - Day 10

Well that's it. It is off the frame. I didn't realise while I was working quite how big it is. When Cy described it as a "Bad Rain: A Double-Page Bedspread" he was quite right. The picture doesn't show all of it because it more than covers our king size bed. Of course it wouldn't actually be any good as a bedspread, it's too fragile and too heavy, but size wise it looks the part.

I thought you might be interested in some facts and figures about this monster of a quilt.

• When bound the quilt will be at least 90"x70"
• There is over 4000m of thread on the front of the quilt
• About 40 pre-wound bobbins were used in this quilt
• More than 1/2m of solid black appears in the quilt - it surprised me, as most of the black - isn't
• 4 1/2 cans of 505 spray baste held the pieces down so I could stitch them
• 3/4 roll of freezerpaper was used to make patterns
• 5m of washaway stabiliser was the pattern and quilting design
• over 15m of ombre fabrics went in to this quilt.
• the master pattern was 112 sheets of A4 paper
  

In ten days all that had come together to make my version of the double page spread from Cancertown. I am thrilled with it and I can't wait to see it hung in my gallery at the Festival of Quilts. It will be the first chance I get to have a really good look at it. I hope some of you will be able to join me there.

I think I will take the rest of the evening off, and get on with a small art quilt tomorrow.

Lily

OK, as promised here is a photograph of the latest picture on the frame. It is being built in four parts, so there is a black line between the first two parts you see here. The parts are also not aligned properly yet. This is just how they landed on the backing.


Believe it or not this is the first good look I have had at this piece too. It's quite possible you are only a few minutes after me. Weird isn't it. I can only see about one third of this at any given moment. So while I am working it seems very abstract. When I am quilting I am looking at the source image to check where the lines need to be as they have to show the shape of the petal. Sometimes it is easy to tell from the change of colours, sometimes I have to make it up as I go along.

I've also found that when I work on these large pieces I find it very hard to follow what the design is. It seems to be worse the more I enlarge and image. In this case the dots looked really strange when I was placing them and quilting them. They are up to about half an inch in diameter, so they are pretty big. Far too big I thought, until I saw the photo here.

For the longarm quilters here is a geeky fact, this quilt is going from the takeup roller to the top roller. I decided I wanted this to roll right side out and my takeup roller doesn't wind that way, so I am working backwards. It seem to work pretty well as the panels are only about 30" square. Obviously this won't work on big quilts, but for a pictorial piece working from the bottom up does often make a lot more sense.

Woo hoo, the editing window seems to have been fixed somewhat since earlier today. Thanks blogger.