Quilt No 122
January 2018
There are no fish in outer space. I think that’s a darn shame, so I’ve made
it my mission to correct the fishlessness of space. Somebody had to do it.
The background of this quilt is a piece of fabric I painted
with Setacolor light sensitive dyes. I
overlaid it with cheese cloth and foil confetti stars. I’m pretty happy that I did this outside,
because the lawn mower was still blowing around tiny foil stars a whole year later. Had I done this indoors I would probably
still be spotting stars in my oatmeal or consorting with the crumbs under the stove.
The fish are my first attempt at what I call “extreme
trapunto”. (Trapunto = stuffing). I put fusible on the back of the fish but
only fused the outer edges, squeezing the shapes while fusing them, so that
they bulged outward. This allowed for
plenty of stuffing, yielding fish that are on the high end of the extreme plumpness scale.
Space Fish was quilted with various gold metallic threads
plus Superior Glimmer thread to give it a little more sparkle. You need that sort of thing when you’re in
deep space. Life in a nebula can be lonely, even for a fish.
