Wonder Under is for friends

I just finished doing yoga* and realized I hadn't written a blog post yet today and there's much to report. Things are really coming along but I feel like this quilt is going a little too smoothly. It worries me a bit. It seems like whenever I have an easy quilt the next one is painfully slow and has to go through many transformations. Better gear up now.



I started the day by printing yellow eyes onto some yellow silk organza that I had great plans for months ago (they fell through). I used the same yellow aqua brite pigment that I used to print some of the rabbit heads and half of the spine. I always keep my leftover pigment colors just in case. They don't go bad if you store them in a closed container, like an empty yogurt bin. Silk organza is lovely and crisp and sheer. You can just barely see it in these pictures with my busy/dirty drop cloth showing through. One of the interesting things about organza is that when you print on it, the image soaks through so you're basically getting two for the price of one. You can see that on the second picture where I've scooted the organza up after printing and the eyes are on the drop cloth.



Then, I ironed wonder under to the back of the organza and cut out all the little eyes with my x-acto. I think I ended up with about 40 of them. What's better than a pile of eyes?



Here they are laid out on the quilt, pre-peeling and pre-ironing. I keep coming back to this halo idea in these quilts. I'm not even a little bit religious, but I keep getting the feeling that these rabbits need to be revered and I want to put them in halos like they're gods or saints.



So here is the quilt as I left it this afternoon. I painted on some reddish brown pigment to darken the background around the halo. The pigment needs to cure for about 24 hours and tomorrow I will need to heat set it. I'm planning quite a lot of hand embroidery on this one. So maybe tomorrow I can also start getting this bad boy ready for quilting. We'll see.



*by "yoga" I mean "yoga booty ballet" that I got from the library. It's bastardized yoga and I was embarrassed to check it out but I do like all the talk about being "supple" and my "muscular booty". I'm also pretty sure it's not OK for a grown woman to say "booty" unless she's talking about the delicious snack called "pirates booty".