Project Quilting 12.6: Ab Intra

This week's Project Quilting Challenge 12.6 theme was Ab Intra, a Latin phrase that means “from within.” Participants were invited to show what it's like inside our body, our social bubble, or perhaps our head as in what sparks our creativity. As I was brainstorming my sources of inspiration, I thought about how quilting, especially Project Quilting, engages both hemispheres of my brain:

• Left Brain: Planning, organization, math, experiments, linear processing, and words
• Right Brain: Emotions, creativity, art, visualization, imagination, and intuition

Starting with left brain thinking, I started Saturday afternoon by experimenting with marking and painting on sheer silk organza fabric. The organza proved to be easy to mark and held up well to direct heat from an iron.

Instead of a brain, I outlined a heart to represent how I love how quilting engages both sides of my brain. I started by filling in the left brain, using very right brain, free-form designing. It felt incongruent, messy, and I just couldn't get it to work. So I scrapped it, took a well deserved lunch break and nap, and then went back to the drawing board to create a new freezer paper heart template.

As I was pressing the organza onto the freezer paper, I gave more thought and planning to my design plan. This time I marked the center line and proceeded to subdivide the left hemisphere into a grid formation.

This structured start aligned well with the left brain thinking as I could fill in the various rectangles with black and white ruler, graph paper, sequences, puzzles, checklists, calculators, and related words. Marking tools used include: Uniball Signo pen, Micron archival pens, Fabrico dual marker, Tee Juice marker, and a Sakura IDenti-pen.

On the right side, I started with a more organic structure and proceeded to improvisationally fill in each wavy ray with color and right brain symbols: hearts, paintbrush, hands, arrows and stars for innovation, and music. Marking pens included Uniball Signo in black and silver, in addition to these amazing Pentel Hybrid Dual Metallic pens.

Back to left brain thinking to engineer a quilt sandwich that would serve as a frame for this marked sheer panel. Freezer paper to the rescue for create a heart frame template for use with reverse applique. 

It was a bit tricky to align the black heart frame with the marked heart. Elmer's School Glue was definitely involved to help align all the layers and at one point, part of the quilt was in my mouth as I desperately needed a third hand to align all the layers. Once the heart was aligned and glue basted, it was layered and pin-basted with batting and Pellon 70 Peltex Ultra Firm Stabilizer. Both halves of the heart frame were topstitched 1/8" from the edge with white thread for the left side and rainbow thread for the right. The stabilizer and batting were then carefully trimmed away from the heart center, making sure not to nick the organza. A solid black background was added prior to topstitching in black thread closest to the heart's edge. Each half of the background was free-motion quilted with either rainbow flames or white zig zag meander. 

Once the quilting was complete, the heart was trimmed away on the quilt back so you could see through the organza center. While the front has all finished edges, I may revisit concealing the raw edges on the backside with some Puffy paint. Each half was then bound with a coordinating stripe: Black & White for the left side and Rainbow for the right.

Thanks to an early start, I actually managed to complete the quilt before midnight! So I had some fun photographing the sheer nature of this quilt:

• In front of my fabrics with black and white bins behind the leftside and brighter colors on the right (photo above). 
• Backlit by my large light box (Photo Below).

It was fun to engage both brain hemispheres throughout the course of this project. 

Left vs Right: A Sheer Delight , Finishes 21" x 18"

Be sure to check out all the amazing Ab Intra interpretations created this past week as part of Project Quilting 6th challenge for 2021! Thanks to Kim and Trish for a fun & fabulous season of Project Quilting challenges!!