Two for One

Today is Fiberactions' reveal for our first color challenge -- which was to create a quilt using colors outside of our comfort zone.

I'd been intrigued for a while by chartreuse and  blood orange, originally inspired by a paper collage I made early last year.  The collage is shown in the first quilt, called Chrysanthemum, printed on two layers of silk organza.

As I pawed through my stash to find material for the quilt, I realized I had more fabric available than I originally thought, and ended up making two quilts for the challenge.

Back to the first piece ~ it contains several pieces of fabric that were shiboried quite a while ago, that I subsequently over-shiboried, and one that I over-printed. 

The dotted piece at the bottom was commercial black fabric with white dots that I'd discharged and didn't really like -- but it worked perfectly for this piece.  Each dot got a glass bead. 

The red circles are from a small shiboried piece -- I cut out the circles, enhanced the color with dye pen, and after quilting them in place I added metallic paintstik to their centers.  The last thing I did was add the chartreuse hand stitching .

Chrysanthemum is 26 x 16 inches.

The second piece, called Silk Road, and finished well before I began the one above, is constructed of two sections of the same piece of silk that I've had in my stash for eons.

Folks who've been following me for years may remember that I had about a yard of peachy-pink crepe de chine from a trip to Hong Kong (on the way to Bali) in 1984, that I dyed chartreuse about four years ago. 

I tore the dyed fabric into pieces and did various other things to them over the years.  The piece on the left was shiboried and then discharged.  The one on the right was shiboried with eucalyptus dye, then shiboried again with Dyn-a-Flow fabric paint.

This piece is entirely hand stitched with silk thread.  Backed with fine cotton with a Chinese silk print on it.  Silk Road is 29 x 21 inches.