This was such a fun quilt to make. It contains so many different techniques and required so many design decisions that I thought it would be a good one to blog on.

I started this quilt in a workshop about using Lutradur. We did several kinds of painting on Lutradur and incorporated some stamping. I had a piece that I painted in shades of blue Lumiere – thinking ahead to using the finished product in an art quilt with an underwater theme.

I was in MY element being able to conjure up a variety of embellishments to use on this piece.

My favorite is the kelp. I used a pipe cleaner (aka fuzzy wuzzy wire) as the base and wound some yarn from my knitting leftover bag around it. Then I was able to bend the piece the way I wanted it and couched it to the background.

The dark purple fish was made ‘offline’ with some underfabric, netting and a lot of thread painting, then attached to give a slightly 3D look.

The coral was a lot of fun to make. First I painted some lutradur and created the coral shapes with a heat tool. I just burned away to get the shapes that I wanted then stitched them down.

A variety of threads were used in the quilting including my favorite bling thread – #30 Madeira .

All the beading was done by hand.

I finished the quilt with a traditional hand stitched binding.