Mixed Media Session 3: Building and Quilting the Substrate

Well, it's time to quilt, but before I do, I need to take these pieces off so that I can do that quilting, but I wanna know exactly where they are. So I'm going to take a quick picture with my cell phone and that way, I'll know exactly where things were beforehand and I can look at that later. So now I can remove things. And I'm gonna make sure that I have my little bits of fabric on straight relative to everything else. And I'm just gonna pin through that top surface. That one looks good and I'm ready to go. Now, I'm gonna be quilting everything with the same color of blue. I'm not gonna switch to a different color of thread, so that's gonna kind of make the rusty orange bits kinda look like they belong more. And I'm using the free motion foot, but you could use a walking foot if you're more comfortable with that and just do whatever stitching that you can do with your walking foot on. There's no reason why you have to free motion if you don't want to. But I do it mostly because it's quicker. And I'm gonna start with this tan piece here. Pull up that bottom thread, there we go. And I'm gonna make a grid that's approximately 1/2-inch all the way across this piece. And I don't really care if my curves line up. I also don't really care if I get any puckers or pleats in this 'cause it's gonna add to the kind of funky feel to it. In fact, I'm gonna let it pucker and pleat all it wants to, which would not be something I would do on a traditional quilt. But I think it looks really cool on this one. Now on this outside edge, I wanna make sure I get that edge down. I'll probably go around it again. And now I'm gonna go the opposite direction and make my grid. And now I'm gonna sew all the way around the outside edge so that I know that it's well tacked down. And I'll kind of pay attention to the fray so that the fray doesn't get caught in my stitch. This would be a place where a closed-toe free motion foot would be handy. And I think I've done that whole bottom portion. So now I'm going to swing over here and start stippling and stipple my way over to this portion up here. And I wanna keep my stipple relatively small, not tiny, but relatively small. Now I'm just gonna jump onboard this piece of rusted fabric and I'm gonna go ahead and do a grid in it also because it's the same type of fabric. And it's highlighting something, so it's gonna be stitched the same way as the other fabric that's doing the same thing. Don't really want that lifted up there. And now I'm gonna go in the opposite direction. I think enough of this edge is stitched down already, so I'm not gonna go around it. I like the fact that a little bit of it isn't stitched down. And I'm gonna go ahead and finish the stippling in the background. And when I can feel the edge of the batting and the Peltex or Timtex, then I'm only gonna stitch to that edge. I'm not gonna stitch past it. And as I get close to that edge, I'm gonna make sure that I have enough of my fabric hanging out that it hasn't gotten anything shorter. And you can see there, where if I put my fingernails there, I can see that ridge there. And so all I need to do is stitch to that ridge. And this last little bit, again making sure I know where that edge is. And get rid of my fringe. Okay, so now our quilting is finished, but I'm gonna go ahead and finish the edge of this before I move on to the next step. And this edge finish on here, what's really fun is that it doesn't really matter if you've distorted your piece during this process. Because once I get it quilted and then I go around the edge several times, it's going to seal that batting and Timtex inside. And then I'm going to fray it and then I can trim the fray so it's even again. So it kinda works out really nice that I get a square piece in the end no matter what. So I'm gonna go ahead and use the edge of that Timtex as a guide and stitch all the way around here a couple of times. You could put your regular foot back on if you want to, but I just do it with my free motion foot. So once I've sealed everything in and gone around it once, then I'm gonna go around it several more times. But what I'm really gonna do is kinda work in place and just build up that stitch line. So here we go back where we started, and so now I'm just gonna go back and forth in motions that are about maybe two inches long and just build up that stitch along the edge there. And I don't want this to be too neat and tidy. I keep getting caught on threads, there we go. What I really want it to do is add some texture to the edge there and seal everything up so that archivally, it's a good end finished product. You're never gonna see that batting or Peltex or Timtex come out and be loose or anything. But this is definitely something you wanna do before you put all your metal bits on because those metal bits are gonna get in your way when you wanna stitch around the edge. Okay. I'm outta bobbin, so that's a good time to stop. But what you can see here is we are ready to start using the substrate. It's got some nice stiffness to it. It's sturdy. It's got some great visual interest with these tucks and pleats that happened, just happened to happen here, which is always nice. We can see that we're kind of distorted on the outside edge, but we can see that we've got a nice square interior design that we can work off of later when I go ahead and finish this edge by fraying it and trimming it. But right now, we're ready to start working with our metal pieces and doing some gluing and then some stitching.