Sometime in late 1999 I took beginner quilt classes with my good friend LeeAnne. We had talked for years about wanting to know how to quilt, and suddenly we had the opportunity to do so. We haven't stopped quilting since, even this week, we met up in a Zoom session with two other quilter friends (we are all biotech research scientists who quilt). Even for just the hour that I was connected, it was really great to chat and hear everyone's sewing machines going.
Sometime in the early 00's I took a Thread Painting class with Libby Lehman at an Empty Spools Seminar that was held at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove. Awesome location right on the beach, with condo accommodations and great food in the conference center. A whole week to just sew! Heaven. Libby Lehman's "Thread Painting" technique earned her a quilt spot in the 100 Best Quilts in the U.S. as chosen by the National Quilt Museum. Check out her quilts "Joyride" and "Escapade" were two that I really admire and are really thread painted. The class with Libby made me less afraid to use thread for more than piecing and quilting. When I got home I knew I wanted to try and make something with a chakram design. And while isn't thread painting, this is the result: a denim jacket with one side of the original chakram design paired with a wildly colored yin yang:
The fabrics are all hand dyes with the two yin yang fabrics from a man who made sequence-dyed fabrics (he started with white fabric, then dyed, re-dyed, painted, stamped, and resisted until he got what he wanted). His name is Mr. Aspidistra (I have been looking for him for a while, but he was elderly back than and may not be around any longer). At $50/yard, I bought small pieces from him whenever I found him at Road to California, an enormous quilt show that occurs in January (though not this year).
I used reverse applique, fused fabric, and metallic threads to make this design. And it was a lot of fun, actually. I used a tight satin stitch for all of the edges. And you can see from this close up I found a batik that I thought approximated Paua shell colors.
I liked Mr. Aspidistra's black and copper fabric so much and thought it evoked Xena's main costume. This close up shows how the variegated metallic thread I was using created a quasi-chakram motif along the edge. This was unexpected.
Here is the flip side of the yin yang. The fuchsia fabric is WILD, and while is some gold and silver on the surface, I was looking for high contrast with the black/copper fabric. That was certainly achieved. You can't miss me in a large crowd when I'm wearing this jacket.
With this shot of the inside of the jacket, now you can see that I made the yin-yang chakram piece before placing it on the jacket. It would have been hard to manipulate the chakram and the jacket together in my sewing machine. I used a paper foundation stabilizer as the backing while I sewed the design pieces together, tearing it away when I was done. The stabilizer would have stiffened the jacket, and being paper, it would have disintegrated in the first wash, and likely become lumps behind the design.
This is a close-up of the top inside and if you look closely, you can see spots of fuchsia coming through the denim. Red and pink dyes are "gifts that keep on giving" so when I do wash the jacket (by itself!) I use a detergent called Synthrapol, which sequesters dye particles so that they don't re-deposit somewhere else on the fabric/quilt/jacket. But there is still fuchsia dye discharging through the denim, so this is notice to wear a dark shirt whenever I wear this jacket. And I do wear it, still.
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