Collage! Quilt! Paint! Session 5: Finishing Up

So once I finish painting something, then I go in and trim it if I'm not happy with the outside edge. If I already like the outside edge all rough and ragged, then I'm gonna leave it the way it is and I'm gonna paint all the way to the end. If I don't like it rough and ragged, I'm gonna trim it before I paint it. And the reason I do that is so that I can also paint that edge during the painting. It's important to make sure that everything's kind of sealed down if you plan on just mounting it. If you're going to stitch it, you can cover that with a stitching, you can cover it with some couching and fibers or whatever, but I tend to always paint that edge no matter what because I'm not sure ever how I'm going to finish a piece. So you can see a little bit of that paint from the back but the entire edge all the way around is painted. So this one has been trimmed and the edges painted. This one has not yet been trimmed, and of course, the edges aren't painted because the painting isn't finished. Then I have to decide which of these two finishing techniques I'm going to do with the piece. Am I going to take it and mount it directly onto a painted canvas, like this one? And so here you can see that raw edge right here that I painted. And it's a good thing I painted it so that it doesn't show any white next to the brown that I also painted the canvas. This is then mounted right on top of it using a PVA glue. A PVA glue is a permanent, non-acidic archival glue, and so that's what I used to mount the finished piece to the canvas. My other option is to take it and choose a fabric that I like to act as its borders. So ideally I could take like a black linen, if I wanted to, and set this right on the middle of that black linen, put batting and backing behind it, top stitch it onto that black linen. So I'm just gonna stitch right around it. And you can see, maybe you can see, but probably not, there's a top stitch line done in this same purple color all the way around here where this was stitched onto this fabric. Then I can quilt it however I want to quilt it, that outside edge. I'm not gonna quilt this inside anymore. It's already quilted all it needs to be quilted. Quilt that outside edge. I can put a binding on it and just hang it like that. I can put a binding on it and mount it, like I've mounted here. So this is not a canvas-wrapped board. These are called stretcher bars and they come in separate units. So there's four separate units. They have a male and a female side and they fit together so that you can make a square or a rectangle of any size that you want. They come in one-inch increments. And then I paint that and I put a piece of mat board on the top of it. And then the quilt is glued using that same PVA glue directly to that mat board. No, it cannot come off. That's just the way it is. You could always put Velcro, I guess, on it so you could remove it if you wanted to. But to me, this is the finished piece of artwork. So that's my final decision here is how will this be finished? And you've got lots of options. More quilting to make it look more quilterly or more painting to let it look more painterly. Either way, I hope you had a lot of fun playing with this technique and that you'll try it over and over again until you find ways to make it your own and that you really enjoy this wonderful collage stitch-paint quilt technique.