Burn it Up!

In my last post, I showed a picture of Vivienne’s quilt from the Portlandia show. She used an interesting technique in her quilt and last Thursday she was kind enough to teach a bunch of us how to do it.

First of all, you have to use all synthetic fabrics, NO COTTON. That was really hard to do. Us quilters are usually such purists about fabrics. It was kind of fun to play with all the shiny, slippery stuff. So step one, you get a piece of felt, polyester of course. Then you start laying little pieces of shiny polyesters on top of it. When you’ve got those however you want them, you put a layer of some kind of sheer on top of that, netting , organza, whatever.

After you’ve got it all layered, you sew everything down on the sewing machine.

You end up with something like this:

Then you put your piece into an embroidery hoop and start burning between some of the stitching with a wood burning tool or a soldering iron. It was kind of scary at first but then I really enjoyed it. How often do you get to purposely burn things up?!

You end up with something that looks like this.

Vivienne was inspired by the work of Susan Lenz whose work she saw at a gallery in North Carolina. Viv bought a beautiful, large piece of Susan’s that hangs over her fireplace. It’s gorgeous. Here is a link to Susan’s explanation of how she makes her pieces.

It was a fun day. Thanks Viv.