Art Quilting

Before

After-- My Finished Piece

Finished Wendy Butler Berns Art Quilting 101 Craftsy Course...and absolutely loved it!  She presented so many beautiful art quilts and demonstrated so many fun techniques to add texture and movement into your quilts.  

I really liked the couching technique and decided to use one skein of ombre yarn to experiment with lines and movement.  I started to play and create these rays that flare out with different colors.  But I was at a loss as to what to do for that center section. I finally just pulled out some thread and it had a little wiggle to it from the way it was rolled in the skein, that created a stipple look...so I covered it all with Sulky water dissolvable stabilizer and worked on couching all the yarn bits down with invisible thread.

Once the stabilizer was removed and the piece was dry again, I loved the look but decided it would be fun to incorporate some free motion quilting in and around the yarn couching.  I had no quilting plan and simply started with some simple outline quilting.  But then I started to add the bubbles between the yarn rays, and loved it.  From there I just moved from section to section doodling away by adding rays, wiggles, wavy lines and more!  I think I used almost an entire bobbin on this one piece (and I have the ginormous Bernina bobbins-so that's a whole lotta thread play!).

Once squared up, I wanted to use the ombre fabric for the binding and needed to do some creative maneuvering to have the ombre colors mirror on both sides...not difficult, but needed some advanced planning.

I forsee lots more yarn and thread play in my quilting future!

Skippy and my Yarn/Threadplay Art Quilt