Art Every Day, Thursday, July 25, 2013
Good Afternoon,
Here is today's new piece. With it, I wanted to push the limits of what I knew about Lutradur. It is a great, melty fabric that I enjoy working with, but I've learned that to get it to melt well I need to keep the paint thin and the quilting average in size. So for this trial, I didn't do either!
I began with a piece of yellow dye painted batting that I topped with a multi-colored piece of dyed cotton velvet which I topped with a piece of Lutradur that I had painted as usual with Dyenaflow but I added more paint to the Lutradur with thick brush strokes of Lumiere, metallic paint.
I separated the piece into several sections with quilting then quilted a different design in each section. Normally when quilting Lutradur I strive for a distance of about 1/2"-3/4" between stitch lines. This distance allows the Lutradur between the stitch lines to melt or "lace" nicely. But with this piece, I stitched about every 1/4".
Once all of the quilting was done I went after the Lutradur with a heat gun to lace it. But, alas, not only was it very heavily painted, it was also heavily quilted. It took a very long time to get it to melt. In fact, I caught the batting on fire three times, embers and all. All of the dark areas you see in the yellow surrounding the blue center are burn marks. The Lutradur would only melt if I touched it with the end of the heat gun and only after I managed to melt away the layer of acrylic paint on top. It was extra stinky and all sorts of goo got stuck on the heat gun and I managed to melt the hell out of the end of the gun too. Thank god I was able to do the melting outside or I may have lost some brain cells along the way too.
I've learned my lesson, thin paint, wide stitching.
Till tomorrow,
Heather
1 comment:
So now we know. lol We do appreciate YOU pushing all of these boundaries, because as much fun as some of them might be to push, others- not so much. Poor heat gun! Glad you could work outside too!
It's too bad that you had such a stinky, gooey mess to learn all this- and some fire to boot. I do have to say though, that I kind of like the burnt areas. Maybe that makes me weird, and maybe they don't look so nice in person.
But in this photo, they look like shades of the colors they are sitting close to, and they suit the piece as a nice frame.
This piece has great luminosity, I assume because of the Lumiere paint, and probably because the of the amount of yellow shining through overall. It has a very nice glow to it, especially through the middle.
Everything we do really is an experiment, isn't it? I'm finding these days that I'm always having to fiddle to find just the right needle and thread each time I sit down- and it's not always a quick process. But I guess that's what you get when you stop JUST piecing cotton squares together to make a bed quilt :)
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