My name is Charlotte, sometimes known as Ms Lottie, occasionally as The Slightly Mad Quilt Lady. This is my blog, where you'll find me writing a lot about my quilting and textile arts and a little about my family's life in a small seaside town in New Zealand. Haere mai!

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Layering Organza

This is a quick post particularly for Miss Jean who commented on my last blog post.  She wrote:

That is a wonderful story for your sweet dusky quilt. I'm intrigued with the layering ideas and would like to learn more. Can you point me?

Well Miss Jean, I did point you in the direction of the process post I wrote recently about making my Early Morning Fishing quilt.  But I thought I'd give you a couple of photos here of another quilt.

It's still in process, but the first photo shows you pretty much the final layout.  It's not completely cropped, but I left the white background fabric sticking out of the side there so you can see the plant printing on it.


There is a whole piece of hand dyed silk organza laid over the entire background and the swallows, also made of silk organza, are placed either under or on top of that overlay depending on how far away I want them to appear.

But I really wanted to show you what's going on at the bottom of the quilt.


If you click on the photo I'm pretty sure you'll see it bigger.  I've folded the piece of organza overlaying the background up and out of the way.  You can see the plant printing on white fabric and then lots of different bits and pieces of silk organza arranged over that.  When the organza overlay is put back, the colours mute down a bit and the shapes get a little more indistinct, but they add complexity and interest.

This is what I talk about when I say I'm layering up silk organza.

There is either Mistyfuse (a fusible web) on the back of the shapes, or I use a bit of BoNash fusible granules under the top overlay to hold everything in place (shout out to Tulis Textiles online here in NZ where you can get both those products).

I hope this helps, Miss Jean!

5 comments:

  1. Oh thank you! I just love the way this looks. You're a genius

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  2. I love silk organza! It is so sheer, it acts like tracing paper, which I often collage into my journals-its a direct correlation in art materials. Learning this fact helped me tremendously.

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  3. Melly, it was one of your books that led to some of my first experiments with silk organza. I have you and Jeanette DeNicolis Meyer to thank as my inspirations!

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  4. Thanks for sharing this approach Charlotte.

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