Posted by dravon in LiveJournal, Pipeline Update | Comments Off on Shadow Work Quilting Experiments on an Embroidered Name Badge
Shadow Work Quilting Experiments on an Embroidered Name Badge
A project I’ve earmarked for future is a shadow work quilt featuring one of Albrecht Durer’s mazes:
I’ve got no clue how to actually do such a quilt, so I’ve set aside several small projects which are my learning projects. Ideally, I’d love to do this quilt in linen for several reasons: (1) it’s much more historically accurate for the time period I’m targetting, and (2) it’s also less common, and I like working in the less common materials. To find out if the linen approach would work, I decided to try it with a name badge that I had to make for myself for the SFVQA anyway. The object: outline my name with a white linen overlay and a black wool underlayer. Cut out the wool, then quilt the piece together.
Results? Less than stellar. The linen is just too heavy for the shadow effect to come through very nicely, so the white on white thread ends up with the whole thing getting lost. I was very unhappy with this experiment.
The second attempt was to abandon the white thread for a colored one, and then use a lightweight cotton muslin as the top layer.
Results? Ho-hum. I’m not thrilled with this either. The entire point of the thing is for the shadow work to be the highlight of the piece, not the colored stitching. That said, the black does marginally show through better on the muslin than on the linen, but the colored thread overwhelms the shadow and so renders the point of it a bit moot. Besides, the muslin stretched so when the second outline of the lettering was done to pin those to the background and batting, the first half of my name has an echo while the last letter ends up perfect. Eeew. Stretchy material on a technique which will really be a slow process… Not good.
In addition, on both of these attempts, the black underlayer is just not precise enough. Clearly, I need to cut out the shadow first and then stitch around it. I confirmed that by looking up some sample directions here. Because this sample was being done on an embroidery machine, my focus for this test was more on how the shadow is accomplished than on the precision of the shadow itself. I’ll have to find some chiffon or something nearly transparent which I can document to period, even though shadow quilting as a technique has zero historical basis in the Renaissance. *lol* I’m strange that way.
In the end, for this name badge project, I abandonned the shadow entirely and went with … well, boring. One aspect of the wool is that it helped raise up the lettering more than the base, giving it a sort of trapunto look, and I do so love trapunto. But getting rid of the wool meant that the white unfilled letters were the same height as the background. Overall impression of my name badge as it now stands: *yawn*
You’ll be seeing these shadow work attempts and mini-projects more often, so that I can work all this out before trying to tackle such a huge project. As for the queen size quilt I’ve got going on right at the moment, the V&A 16th century German quilt with the cording and trapunto, that is underway. Given the huge amount of stitching it will require, I’ve just finished taking a long arm quilting class so that I can do the outlines on a long arm machine. By the time I’m done with that, I’ll be a hell of a driver so that I can do the curved edging around the many little bits in the Durer image above. *grin*
