Luminosity from my art quilt group

Inspirations come from many sources.  My small quilt group spent the first quart of 2015 studying “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron.  Each week we added an exercise that would help us grow as quilt artists.  We picked luminosity one week.  We all studied up on what it meant, found some great examples of quilts and artwork that represented the concept, and shared our thoughts.  I bought some luminous yarn, and made a nest quilt.  Here is my process on this quilt.

Sketchbook from Feb 1, 2015

My sketches were all yucky as you can see above.  So I went straight to my design wall.  The  background fabric was the best find from my stash.  It fades from light to dark and gives the feeling of light coming up from the horizon.  For the nest, I gathered up a pile of fiber that included yarn, goat hair, glitzy costume fabric, vintage bias binding, hand dyed ribbon, string, decorative thread, bits of netting, and shreds of fabric.  After piling it up on the background, I covered it with Solvay, stitched the heck out of it, and rinsed away the Solvay.  This sort of felted the nest.  The nest looked too ungrounded to me.  So after it dried, I couched down more bias binding and ribbon.

"Luminosity Nest" by Joanne Adams Roth

It still felt too ungrounded so after I quilted the bottom grass, I painted the blades with Derwent Inktense pencils and followed that up with fabric medium.  Then I quilted the rest of the piece with several shades of yellow and green thread to try to keep the gradual fading of the background fabric.

Oh, I knit a stocking hat from the luminous yarn too!