Behind this old adage, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, is a literal truth. On art quilt-ralted social media pages I fairly often see comments or pleas for help that have obviously resulted from a maker using a new (to them) technique or a material for the first time, and I suspect that this is one main reason people just give up on a project and move on to the next one. Taking some time to make samples first is a good investment in a project.

In the last few weeks I have made quite a few samples while planning a quilt to be made in wool to enter in Art Quilt Australia. I don’t normally work in wool, but the lovely piece I bought late last year is almost sufficiently delightful to work with to prompt me to totally ditch my stash of cotton fabrics so favoured by art quilters. I’ve been living in Uruguay for some years now, and the almost complete absence of cottons in the market place here has long prompted me to consider the textile art potential of almost every other fabric I encounter, with the guiding priniciple ‘work with what’s around you’. While looking for something else late last year, I stumbled across this fabulous metallic finish polyester, and on impulse bought some. I can’t imagine wearing it as it would be very body-clinging (and mine’s a bit lumpy to appear in public wearing it) and probably would be too sweat making for yoga pants or dance pants… and it’s not nearly robust enough for upholstery. But never mind, my impulsive purchase of this glittery fabric helped the store get rid of a bit of it.

Two weeks ago I wrote “From handling just this one sample, I now know that (1) I’m open to ditching the metallic and using another fabric to show behind the top wool layer (2) Whatever fabric shows through those holes, it really needs to be a complete layer between the front and the back as in reverse applique, the finest examples of which are the molas of the Kuna people of San Blas Is., off the coasts of Panama and Colombia.“

But I’ve since found that (1) I’m more committed than ever to the metallic fabric, and (2) further sample making showed that the same impact is more elegantly presented by direct applique, not reverse aplique. That’s also good news as less of the fabric will be used up/wasted by being hidden between layers 🙂

Because I still had some reservations about which threads to use, I continued experimenting :

And arrived at this final version, and happy with the result, am now well advanced with making this new work:

Conclusion – simpler is better, and the block of black zigzag is really quick and easy to remove, giving an interesting effect which I’ll exploit further another time.