Illuminating Hillside

This is my last Four In Art blog post.

The Four In Art group will close it's doors at the end of the year.

It's time to move onto other project and adventures. 

Four In Art has been a wonderful group to be part of 

to explore and develop new ideas with quilting.

I wish all the member of Four In Art all the best 

with their creative ventures in the future.

When one door closes another one opens.

One of my new adventures is designing fabric & quilts for 

Paintbrush Studios.

My first collection will be available in the early spring.

There are a total of 28 fabrics in it.

I can't wait to share more about this new adventure 

as we get closer to it's release date. 

This quarter's Four In Art theme is... 

Illumination.

For this quilt I used.... 

burlap

linen

quilting cotton

upholstery fabric

and....

FOIL.

I thought mixing up the textures would be advantageous.

I immediately started to slice and dice the 

fabric & foil without taking any initial photos.

OOPS!

Here's a sampling of my fabric after it was cut it up.   

I used glue and pins to secure the hills to the black background.

Here's what it looks like just before I did a little top stitching

with mono fillament. 

The quilt sandwich is ready for quilting. 

Yes, those silver hills are made of aluminum foil. 

I wanted to show how the hills were illuminating in the night sky and 

thought that they should be reflective. 

I looked around everywhere for my silver fabric and

couldn't find it, so...foil was the substitute medium.

I've been using a lot of foil with an applique method I heard about from

Elizabeth at Occasionalpiece-Quilt

Since I already had foil on my work table 

it wasn't hard to incorporate it into the project. 

Then I used GLOW IN THE DARK thread for quilting. 

Illuminating Hillside, Simone Gautier Bradford 2017

Here's a few views of the glow in the dark thread.

So photographing glow in the dark thread isn't that easy.

The thread needs to sit out in the sun for a good 5-10 minutes 

to activate the photosensitive thread. 

Then.......I run like mad with the mini quilt into the 

darkest room in the house, which for me is the laundry room.

Then I take the pictures with my camera while 

I can't even see anything through the lens. 

I raw edge finished the quilt. 

The entire quilt has rough burlap edges that are fraying. 

I figured using non-traditional binding would work since 

burlap and foil aren't traditional quilt mediums anyways. 

Here's a view of the backside. 

Outside at sunset.

And that's a wrap.

You can view other fabulous Four In Art projects below.

Betty Ayers	https://www.flickr.com/photos/toot2
Catherine Chisholm	http://www.knottedcotton.com
Elizabeth Eastmond	http://www.opquilt.com
Janine Green	http://www.rainbowhare.com
Nancy Myers	http://www.patchworkbreeze.blogspot.com
Rachel Riley	http://www.rachel-thelifeofriley.blogspot.com