Cosmos, Part 1

Hello! I’m delighted that you are visiting my blog. Maybe you’re here because you’re curious about my latest art quilt? It's called Cosmos.

Making this quilt has been a long process, and from the start I decided to be open about how I work so that those who were interested could follow along on Instagram and Facebook and see how things evolved in real time. Regular posts on social media also functioned as a diary for me personally and were something that spurred me on in my work.

I have decided to write a series of blog posts about the whole process as a recap that ties everything together for both those who have followed me from the start and those who have joined at a later point, as well as for me personally. This first post is about the background story, the inspiration, my philosophy in art making and the first stages, where I dyed the materials I was going to use. The following posts will deal with design, machine quilting and creative hand quilting.

I made the decision to make this quilt on 2 August 2018, which means that it took me about 7 months to finish it, or 5 months if we disregard the 2 months when I needed a break and did other things. But the process had started in my head long before the actual decision to make a new quilt.

About 1.5 years ago stargazing and astronomy entered my life in a more structured way than before and when summer came I thought it would be fun to have cosmos flowers on my balcony. I adored their elegantly long and thin stems and it didn’t take long before I got out my sketchbook. And an idea started to quietly evolve in my head: a quilt with cosmos flowers as well as Cosmos, the ordered universe.

And then, weeks later, one night just as I was falling asleep it was if someone had pushed a button in my head, and I got out of bed and furiously scribbled down a rough sketch with ideas. Looking at that sketch now, it doesn’t look that much like the finished quilt. But this is often how my process starts: with messy scribbles on the nearest piece of paper.

When I make art quilts I like to colour my own fabrics, because that gives me creative freedom to do whatever I want. I’m not limited by the materials the shops have to offer, only by my own skills, and skills can be learned. In fact, learning new skills and gaining new knowledge is a strong driving force in my creative process. I love to learn new things.

So I started by experimenting with ice dyeing and fibre reactive dye as I wanted a soft and organic pattern in the area that would become a nebula (deep space object ACL 1, as I called it, a pun on the cataloguing systems used by astronomers). This was easier said than done with the type of dye I was using. It took me 4 attempts to get a result I was happy with, and only by ditching the ice and returning to the tried and true method of low water immersion dyeing.

The next step was to define the nebula. I started by cutting out paper roughly the size and shape that I preferred for the flower heads and arranging them on the fabric. I marked the outer edges of the nebula, first with string and then with basting stitches, to help me in the next step: overdyeing with black.

When it was time to add black, I thickened the dye for better control of where it went and used both a brush and my (gloved!) finger to distribute the dye. I removed the basting stitches at the end, to make sure they wouldn’t leave marks.

I then let it all dry before steam fixing the dye in a diy home steamer. (Instructions for making your own steamer can be found in this excellent book by C. Soderlund & M. Testa.)

After washing and drying the fabric I used thinned white fabric paint to spatter stars all over the surface. This is one of my favourite things to do: it’s pure magic to see how a shower of white paint can transform a surface into a starscape.

Then it was time to create a backing fabric. For an art quilt I prefer to dye the backing fabric too, as I consider it part of the whole. I decided to try ice dyeing with the same dye one last time. It didn’t work. However, I decided to use the fabric even though I considered it a failure, and afterwards I was very glad I did. The fact that it is very pale means that all the stitching can be seen easily on the back of the quilt. I decided early that the stitching should be mostly tone on tone, which means that a lot of my hard work can barely be seen on the front, unless you go very near the quilt. But the back bears witness of it.

Finally, I also decided to dye matching embroidery thread, partly because I wanted to try dyeing my own threads, and partly because it ensured that the thread would match the fabric perfectly.

That’s all for now. Next time I will talk about designing the flowers and creating the quilt top. Thanks for visiting my blog and I hope to see you here again soon for the next part of the story!