Saturday, December 6, 2014

My Quip – Our Equality Quilt – 99.99% of Quilting Completed

Good Day,

Thought you might be interested in an update.

99.99% of the quilting has been completed for our Equality Quilt.


Thank you Keith Haring for your vision.

With permission of the Keith Haring Foundation many months ago Andy and I received the go ahead to use Keith Haring’s art as a basis for our quilting work. We discussed a number of issues. The main issue we discussed was the possibility of reproduction for commercial use. (Obviously there are a lot of persons on this planet who do not necessarily follow the rule-of-thumb regarding copyright.)


I actually redrew Keith’s 1987 Untitled work on acetate. Next I then burnt a stencil through the acetate.


Andy then pounced the stencil with chalk powder. He then quilted each of the 81 blocks. Each block has 80 starts and stops which each has to be knotted and buried into the layers of the quilt sandwich. It took him about 3-plus hours per block. Oh and that’s about 6,480 starts and stops


The border is one that I created myself. Same technique with the burning tool and the acetate. As each set of "crowd" is 9 characters, which I also drew connected, Andy did not have as many starts and stops as for the blocks.


The quilting and the binding on our new and completed Equality quilt has been done. The four corner figures are left. Andy and I are both extremely pleased with our work and the final product. Stay tuned for my final write up of our Equality project journey at Quilts SB. (http://quiltssb.com/)

To follow our Equality progress and construction check out the following Quilts SB links.

My Quip – Our Equality Quilt – Quilting Update and Progress 

My Quip – Update – Equality Quilt 

My Quip – Equality – Quilts and Wall Hangings in Progress 

My Quip – A New Quilt – Equality

If you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, and comments please feel free to email Andy or me at Quilts SB. Also please note that our Quilts SB new URL address is http://www.quiltssb.com.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

2 comments:

Aidan said...

Amazing work. I am grateful for the opportunity to see it.

One question -- purely technical. How dost one burn a template through acetate? I am intrigued. Nothing I do cutting works very well.

Jim Smith said...

Aiden, I used a, what is called today, a Stencil Cutter. I remember when the same tool was called a wood burning tool and I had one many, many years ago to burn and etch wood. Same thing. I drew the characters on the acetate with a Sharpie and allowed for spaces so as not to cut the whole out, if that makes sense. Jim