Subtle

No, I'm not referring to Sarah Palin's performance (and that's what it was, in the sense of scripted and theatrical) in her debate with Joe Biden last night.

I've had this quilt on my design wall since last spring. Now that fall is here, I was determined to git 'er done. I posted about my original inspiration and design process here. My hangup was that the brownish squiggly fabric that I'd conceived as a unifying element just wasn't strong enough to do the job. I tried shadowing with fabric paints; still not assertive enough. (This is a very busy quilt!) Eventually, over the course of several sleepless 3 AMs, it came to me: dark organza.

The penultimate version is on the left, the finished product on the right. Unlike Biden and Palin, you can barely distinguish them, especially on a computer screen (though you can click the image to enlarge it), but to me, the sheer overlay makes a huge difference. I had just enough yardage from a natural-dyeing workshop (Was it walnut? Logwood with an iron mordant? Who knows?) to lay over most of the surface, quilt roughly along the seams of the problematic brown squiggle fabric, and then clip away the excess. Here's a detail of the overlaid and stitched-down organza:


I'm pleased with the result, and glad to get another UFO out of my workspace. It looks like fall is here for sure, and with it, quilting weather.