After the fire

This piece is a stark contrast to my more usual rain forest inspired art quilts with their lush greenery. Sadly this burnt out landscape is also a reality and there are large areas where forest fires have devastated the rain forest.

I made this piece for a recent group challenge set by the SAQA Oceania group where we had to create a small art quilt trying out something new, using materials or techniques we hadn’t use before but only using things we already had on hand.

For this small quilt I used fabric paints to paint over a piece of previously dyed fabric. The original piece was a pale yellow with a few darker patches and  I painted over it with oranges, yellows and purples to get a sunset effect. What is good about this technique is that as the paints are transparent you get the interesting patterns and texture of the original dyed fabric showing through under the paint.

This is the piece before quilting or stitching

This technique is something I have only started doing recently but my main experiment was to use painted fusible interfacing for the appliqué. I’d heard of this technique but never tried it before and I was interested to see how it worked. I wasn’t quite sure how to do it but I drew the outline of the tree on fusible interfacing, painted it with black acrylic paint and then cut out and fused to the background. I stitched around all the edges just to make sure it stayed in place. 

detail of the tree and background

I didn’t want to mask the subtle colours of the background so I used a very fine 100wt polyester thread for my quilting which I did in all over spirals for the sky and straight lines for the ground.