Art and Cold Cash - Part 4

After reviewing the quilting with Jack Butler on this piece, he decided that he wanted to add some Inuit script in the borders at the upper left and right hand sides.  I have now finished that and this is being handed over to Bernice this weekend for the beading.  Once that is completed, there may be either some additional quilting or perhaps some hand quilting / embroidery to finish the piece. 

Below are some detailed images of the additional quilting.

The goal is to have this completed by the spring.  Time will tell given that this is a collaborate piece and requires the time of multiple people and coordination between everyone.

Art and Cold Cash - Part 3

It has taken some time but the quilting and machine embellishment on the Art and Cold Cash quilt is now finished. I just finished up the couching of some embellishment yarns today. Now what remains is the beading, hand embroidery and then the quilting of the final images in parts of the border.

Echo quilting was done in the large open background spaces as well as in the small red space in the upper left hand side of the quilt.

There is a profile of a boy on the left hand side and the image was emphasized with a teal chenille yarn that was couched along the edges of the outline of the profile.

A thicker teal nubby yarn was couched around the fish bone to give it dimension and below you can see it's detail as well as some of the echo quilting.

All of the English hand writing and Inuktitut syllabics were outline quilted in a combination of teal and scarlet thread. Since teal and scarlet variegated thread is hard to come by what I did was use a double thread (one spool of teal and one of scarlet) in the top of the machine and teal in the bobbin. I used a top stitching needle since it has a larger eye than a quilting needle for the two threads to freely feed through and had no problems with tension or pull. It worked out to have a nice effect and I may use this in the future when I can't find a variegated thread in a colour combination that I want. Below if you click on the picture you should be able to see the detail of the two colours of thread used in the quilting.

The hand embroidery will be of the four o'clock flowers that are in areas of the quilt that aren't already quilted with words. The flower seeds will be beaded with seed beads. These will be the next steps.

Art and Cold Cash - Part 2

Bernice and I got the borders on the black version of Art and Cold Cash piece done and the quilt sandwich put together. The small red inner border really makes the top come to life.

For the red and white version we didn't put any borders on it for the time being and only did up the quilt sandwich with the image portion. The reason behind this is that the borders are going to be a cream coloured raw silk which has a tendency to fray. So between all the handling that the main body of the quilt is going to get with all the quilting and embellishment we decided that this one will be done in the "quilt as you go" format. Once the quilting and embellishment is done, we will make up the border pieces attach them and finish up with additional design work on them. By doing it this way we won't have to worry so much about being extremely careful in how we handle the first phase of the quilting and embellishment of this quilt.

So we now have to meet with Jack to go over the plans for what will get quilted and what will be embellished and how. Hopefully this meeting will happen within the next week so that we can start making progress on this project.

Art & Cold Cash - Collaborative Art Quilt Project

I'm working on a collaborative art quilt project with friend and artist Jack Butler and another quilter friend Bernice. Jack spent several years living up in northern Canada (Baker Lake, Nunavut: located 320 km (200 mi) inland from Hudson Bay) with the Inuit working on a critical exploration of the introduction of capitalism into Northern economies. "Art and Cold Cash" explores how capitalism was introduced to Inuit culture through the development of indigenous arts and crafts industries.

During this project Jack explored his own introduction to money with a work titled "My First Memory of Money is Selling Flower Seeds Door to Door". This piece is a story of his grandfather showing him how to package 4 o'clock seeds in envelopes and then going door to door selling them to the neighbourhood mothers.

Jack's original work was digitally scanned and the image was sent to Spoonflower to be printed onto cotton fabric. The size of the printed image is approx. 30" by 40".

This cloth version will be quilted and embellished with thread painting, beads yarn and ribbon. There will be a small inner border of red fabric about 1/4" and the outer border will be a cream raw silk which will also contain some additional embellishments. We are still planning out the details of the treatment.

In addition there was a digitally manipulated version of the image that was also printed onto cotton fabric in the same dimensions. This image has a "northern lights" kind of feel to it and will also be quilted and embellished. It will also have a 1/4" inner border of red fabric and the outer border is a dark blue and black mottled cotton.

This will be an on going project for many months given it's collaborative nature and I will keep you posted on its progress. We have yet to decide which of the two we are going to start first.