Quilt 489

I submitted this quilt to Quilt Con this morning!  It was Quilt 489.

Of course, I think of this quilt not as “489” but as “The Full Stops Quilt” since it is based on a paper collage by Anna Betts called “Full Stops.”  You can see the collage here along with process shots of me dying the fabric circles.

For anyone who is new here, I sell the plexiglas resists used to make shapes while dying in my etsy shop.  The process is a variation on immersion dyeing (read my tutorial here) and the shapes ship with complete instructions for clamping and dyeing.  I’m mostly-out of circles at the moment, but they will be back soon, and I’m getting hexagons, too!

I started thinking about this quilt in 2010 and did some of the dying then, but I did most of the dyeing this summer and then the piecing at a retreat with the Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild.  A few months later, a week before the Quilt Con deadline, I decided to see if I could finish this quilt up and submit it!  This was, of course, the day before leaving for my Thanksgiving trip (5 days out of town).   I had a little bit of piecing left to do, so I put some hustle in my bustle, finished the piecing, and then packed up the quilt top, some batting, and a back with me to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving.  I pin-basted the quilt at my parents house.

By the way, check out my mom’s dog, Olive.

Crazy cute, right?

Once back from my trip, I snuck out to the studio whenever I wasn’t needed at work and by Wednesday night had this baby quilted and bound!  The quilt then went through the washer and was ready for photos on Friday morning (this morning!)

I was so excited to wake up and see a bright-but-overcast day.  That’s my favorite light for photographs.
This orange wall is attached to Spur Studios (where I work on my quilts).  I have always liked the color.

The quilt is held up with masking tape.  I was a little worried that the quilt would fall off, so I threw my easily-washed not-easily-stained fleece blanket on slightly-wet-and-cigarette-butt-littered ground. That slipper?  That’s my camera case at the moment. 🙂  My old case doesn’t fit around the longer lens I keep on the camera now and the slipper is clean and padded.  I don’t know if anyone oversaw this photo shoot, but if they did, I can only assume they were greatly amused.

Especially as I moved around to get close-ups from a variety of angles.

This little piece remains my favorite.

I hope this quilt gets to go to Quilt Con!  I think the show is going to be great and I’m really looking forward to taking classes–I’m signed up for classes with Sherri Lynn Wood (Friday), Lotta Jansdotter (Saturday afternoon), and Denyse Schmidt (Sunday). There were many more classes I was interested in, but only so much time in the day and money in the wallet, so decisions had to be made.  If only I had a time-turner and a million dollars.