How Do You Finish The Edges?

    So, you've just finished the front and back of one of your works... Now you have to decide what to do with the edges to give it a finished look. Do you sew on a binding, a facing, do a pillowcase finish, or leave the edges raw? The answer should depend on the theme of the piece and the style of it. In the beginning, I used to put traditional bindings on my art quilts because I thought it was required. As I look back on them, I think it was a good choice for most of them because of the way I quilted them. They needed the "frame" around them to complete them.

Water Cycles

Then, later on, I started monoprinting my fabrics with paint. That gave a different look to my work, and a framed edge wouldn't look good. They needed a clean edge. So I sewed on a pillowcase backing to these after most of the quilting was done. Then I did a little more quilting through to the backing to secure it.

Beach Walk

     Lately, I've been dyeing my fabrics and doing hand stitches for the quilting. These pieces are fused to ecofelt before I do the stitching. I was going to sew a facing to these, but decided to leave the edges raw instead. The felt backing causes them to hang very straight and the style lends itself to a raw edge. But to give it a finished look, I hand stitch a running stitch around the edge 1/4" to 1/2" from the edge. Since I had running stitches here and there on the front, and stitched it so the stitches were interrupted with spaces periodically, I did the same to the edge. I could have machine stitched the edge, but I wanted the stitches to be the same on the edges as they are throughout the front. Also, I changed thread color as I went around the edge to match the color of the fabric so that the edge stitching blends in rather than standing out. On other pieces in the future, perhaps I'll use a contrasting thread color depending on the look I want.

Taking Root

     To prevent the cloth on the edges from fraying in the future, I dipped a 1/4" flat brush in matte medium and ran it around the edges. 

close-up of one corner

     I've also made some small (5x7) collages and decided to mount these on 8x10 canvasses in order to make them look more like art than little craftsy things. To do that, I finished the edges first with stitching as I did on the larger pieces, put matte medium around the edge to prevent fraying, and fused them with Misty Fuse to canvases that I had wrapped in black linen. 

Little Transformation1

Little Transformation2

     On the back, I glued ecofelt with a label attached, hammered in upholstery tacks, applied hanging wire, and covered the ends of the wire with tape.

back of a collage

side view of a collage

It really does take a while for me to finish off the pieces, but it's worth it to give a more professional look to them.  And, I'm really loving several products for this... EcoFelt, Misty Fuse, and Embroidery floss. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

What To Do With A Piece That Isn't Working?

      Haven’t we all had works that started out with such promise and us with such enthusiasm about them? And then either we’ve overworked them or somehow we just couldn’t get the tone we wanted out of them? Well, that seems to have happened with my latest small piece. It started as just a line study in crinoline. Then I wanted to develop it a little farther into a meditative piece with a Buddha. Since it was a small quilt, I felt I would just work free and easy and see where it went and have fun with it. It was great fun at first, but then I kept making adjustments. I thought I was liking it and when I thought it was done, I realized it wasn’t working out.  So how do I end it so that I’m happy with it?

     Since I last showed you the quilt, I added a fabric piece to the bottom. I had found a teal cotton piece that I had treated with some rusty hardware some time ago. To fit it with this quilt, I added some some texture rubbings with Shiva Paintstiks and left the rough edge of the fabric on the bottom edge. 

rubbing plate, paintstik, brush, palette,
tape to get pain on bottom edge of fabric

And I couched a fiber onto the border of it.  I found some sari silk ribbons and sewed those onto the other edges with the intent of squaring them off but then I liked the pattern of the edges they already had. So for the time being, I’m leaving the edges as they are. And I do love the edges. Funny that I love the fabric piece at the bottom and the sari ribbon shapes more than the actual quilted piece I started with.

     My stitched Buddha wasn’t the greatest. Since the quilt wasn’t looking good to me, I thought that was the problem. So I stitched another Buddha. The Buddha looked much better. Better face, better hand, better foot, but not a better quilt. 

with the new Buddha, couched fiber,
sari ribbon-borders, and bottom fabric

So I removed the Buddha and the squares and pinned a monk from sheer fabric in its place. 

Put a Monk on it!

A little better, but still, I don’t like the quilt as a whole. Next step was to look at the quilt without a monk or a Buddha or squares. 

Sigh (not the title)

It looks empty now.

     The end of this story for me is to put it away for a long time and work on something else. I sure wish I had a design expert on hand to tell me where I went wrong so that I could learn from it, but maybe in the future I’ll figure it out. So for now... Let it go... Let it go... Let it go...

Don't you wish you had a private art expert to guide you? Or would that take away your voice? What do you think? I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please leave comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by.