The last prompt for Round 2 was my choice. Doors, Portals and Openings. I’ll be honest, this one was harder than I thought, even though I knew what my topic would be since, well, almost 2 years ago.  I had too many design ideas floating through my brain. I printed out a completely different composition on fabric. But as I was quilting it, I didn’t like it well enough to finish. So back to the drawing board.  What could I complete in a couple of weeks? 

One of the last fabric pieces I printed myself on the Pixeladies’ printer was a piece of dupioni silk.  The colors were way out of my normal color range, but for some reason I really liked it. I had no idea what I would do with it. I even printed out two versions. Here’s a close-up of the two. In the end I chose the piece with more blue (the bottom one in the image below).

 It wasn’t 40” long, so I couldn’t just quilt it. Why not cut it up? It was just fabric after all.  Dupioni is notorious for raveling, so I backed it with a fusible tricot interfacing, then cut it up into rectangles of a 2: 1 ratio. Then I dug into my scrap bag (really several large scrap boxes) and pulled out coordinating colors.

After playing with the fabrics on my design wall, I decided I wanted to make a bunch of separate doors and somehow put them together.

I was almost finished quilting the individual doors with perle cotton, and I still hadn’t figured out how to put them together—and keep them together on a wall. 

I didn’t think I wanted a solid color background, so I decided to pull out the trusty Mokuba free lace paper. It’s a two-part water soluble base. The bottom is sticky, so you can put things on it and have them stay in place (kind of like contact paper) and the top is clear (kind of like cellophane).  You have to stitch through everything sandwiched between the two layers, or when you wash the base away, the pieces will just fall apart.

Again I went to the Pixeladies’ stash and pulled out a bunch of perle cotton colors that coordinated with the door.  I drew some lines on the back of base and placed the threads in straight lines. With the sewing machine I stitched gray lines perpendicular to the perle cotton. Then I decided to add a few more rectangles of thread. The piece looked boring, so I changed thread color and stitched some more.

Once I was happy, I washed out the base (it turns into a goopy, syrupy mess when you get the Mokuba free lace wet). After you rinse out all the goop and let it dry, the threads become a light airy “free lace” fabric.

By the time that dried, I had created a pleasing placement of the doors, and lo and behold, all the doors connected to each other. I didn’t really need the free lace I had created after all. I’m still not sure if I’m going to attach the doors to the free lace or not.  Maybe I’ll make it detachable and leave it up to the person who buys the piece. Anyone interested?

In case you were wondering about the design for the fabric, here are the images I started with, two digital doodles and a photograph of some buildings in Hong Kong. Playing with images in Photoshop is way too much fun!

And here’s a detail of the finished piece:

Doors
Deb Cashatt
Dimensions: 40″ h x 20″ w
Material: Digital Print on 100% silk dupioni (reactive dye), other fabric of various fiber content, cotton batting, cotton backing. Perle cotton.
Technique: Digital collage. 15 separate quilts stitched together. Hand quilted.