Another Quilt in Progress...

“ANGELINA GOES TO TOWN” 18”w x 29”h c Pat Dolan

The base of this quilt began with a piece of hand-dyed cotton I did several summers ago, and then set aside for the ‘perfect project.’ Last summer, I was playing with Angelina hot mix fibers and I fused numerous sheets of it – some of which were layered with various types of yarns, cording, feathers, and one even had a string of hand-crocheted copper embedded in the fibers. I made a large file folder full of these decorative Angelina sheets for later use in various art projects.

This spring, I put together several quilt sandwiches using my hand-dyed fabrics. For this particular piece, I decided to place several of those ‘stuff-embedded’ sheets of Angelina on the quilt top moving them around until I found a pleasing arrangement. Then, using 505 basting adhesive, I affixed the fused Angelina sheets to the cotton base in preparation for quilting.

This week I decided to quilt away – with no quilting pattern in mind at the outset - and see what would happen to all those Angelina sheets with free-motion quilting. The first step was to very broadly quilt a swirling single line across the entire quilt top – partly to ‘set’ the placement more firmly to the cotton, and partly to get a feel for how I would eventually quilt the top. I found myself responding to the pieces of embedded decorative yarns for some of the quilting, and eventually I realized I was creating something similar to topographical mapping across the surface of the quilt. Do you know of those maps that show the elevation of an area? The closer together the lines are, the more abruptly the land surface rises and/or falls. It provides a symbolic ‘birds-eye view’ of the land elevation formations and I’ve always liked those particular types of maps for that reason. And this quilt has taken on the feeling of those topographical maps in some way.


“ANGELINA GOES TO TOWN” – approximately 8” x 10” detail c Pat Dolan

Above you get a glimpse of the shiny Angelina atop the hand-dyed cotton. You can see two different kinds of decorative yarns embedded in the Angelina, and you can see the quilting, done with numerous colored threads.

I doubt that this piece is ‘done…’ and rather suspect it will sit around awhile before I decide what’s next for it. Or maybe I’m really waiting for IT to tell me what is next… In any case, the over-all experimentation went rather well. The Angelina fused sheets stayed where I placed them with very little shifting. Occasionally some of the looser fibers got entangled with the darning foot, but that was easy to fix.

What do you think, so far? Any ideas for what might be next? If worse comes to worse, I can always cut it up into fiber art cards for next years American Cancer Society fund raising event on Virginia Spiegel’s web-site!