Release Your Light

Scroll down to read about how this quilt was made

Release Your Light began with a dream.

In November 2008, I was laying in bed, feeling pretty sorry for myself and (I'll admit it) wallowing in self-pity. I can't quite explain WHY I was feeling so bad at that time simply because I'm not really sure myself.

I think the main reason I was upset is because I felt frustrated and limited by what I had designed in The Duchess. It was in a difficult stage and I was bursting to try something new.

I felt so filled with creativity, but couldn't use it because I was in neck deep with a quilt I wouldn't finish for 3 more months.

Suddenly I saw this image of a woman bursting with light and creativity. In her hands, she held a ball of light: her creativity. Her light was so bright, it blocked out everything.

I began to hum the song "This Little Light of Mine" that I often sing to my little boy, and I began to get chills! I was so overwhelmed with the image and how much love and power was surging through my body while I thought of it.

I began to change the words of the song until they felt just right:

This little light in me, I'm gonna set it free, This little light in me, I'm gonna set it free, Set it free, Let it be, Set me free.

While this whole experience may sound very weird, it was one of the most powerful and dramatic of my life.

I see the figure as a representation of all people. We are all so creative, it's bursting to get out of us! Set it free by trying: sing, dance, paint, quilt - whatever you need to do in order to live a more open and creative life.

I wanted to start this quilt immediately, but I knew that if I stopped working on The Duchess, I might never finish it. I drew the design and hung it in my studio so I could look at it every day.

After completing The Duchess, I began to design Release Your Light. My method of designing is a little odd. I use large graph paper that I tape together with masking tape until it feels the right size. This can get me into trouble, and it certainly did in this situation!

I wanted the central figure to be the dominate aspect of the quilt, so I started with a very big piece of graph paper. This became a problem because I kept having to tape more and more paper to the quilt as it expanded. Pretty soon, my paper design was covering every inch of my 8 ft x 9 ft table and this was only 1/4 of the quilt!

I knew I needed to resize the quilt then, but didn't want to. Call it laziness, call it being stubborn, I knew I wanted this quilt to be BIG!

I decided to hand appliqué the body and hair of the goddess to the center of the quilt because I knew I was going to need my sewing room free for the next month while I quilted "Baskets in Bloom" for my local quilt guild's raffle.

Production on Release Your Light slowed to a crawl as I worked on other quilts and projects and hand appliquéd only when I had nothing better to do (can you tell I don't like hand work???).

It took 2 months to finish the hand appliqué and by that point I had realized that I really didn't like the effect it gave to the quilt. The next time I try an appliqué project, I plan to try machine applique with invisible thread.

Regardless, I was at a point where I had to decide whether I was going to appliqué the rest of the rays or not. I decided that would probably not see this quilt finished before my son (who's 2) graduated from college if I hand appliquéd all the flames and rays.

So I made the huge leap in judgment to forget appliqué and instead just paint the quilt top with Shiva Paintstiks! I'd gotten the idea from the book "Quilts of a Different Color" and really wanted to try the technique.

Another lesson I learned from this quilt: ALWAYS TEST YOUR TECHNIQUES!!!

I didn't test how long it would take or how much paint I would need to cover this gigantic quilt with paintstiks. I just assumed (wrongly) that painting would be easier than appliqué!

So the quilt top was sandwiched and I began quilting. Because I was going to paint the top, I chose not to use trapunto.

This means that the whole quilt, almost every inch of all 77 inches square had to be quilted with dense filler stitching.

Here is a photo of the quilt before it was painted, but after more than 400 hours of dense filler quilting:

I found myself using Stippling in the body center, McTavishing in the circle background, Stippling again in the first set of red triangles, Flame Stitch in the outside flames, McTavishing again in the corners and Stippling in the black background.

As you can probably guess, I got pretty sick of these three filler stitches by the end of this quilt!

Here is a close up of the dense microstippling and flame stitch used in the ray before it was painted.

I also decided to make Release your Light my very first 2 sided quilt. This is a photo of the back side of the quilt:

Deciding to quilt so densly and with so little trapunto was a very expensive and time consuming mistake.

The more space you fill with trapunto, the less space you have to fill. I was using Isacord polyester thread which is wonderfully thin and not excessively expensive, but still I went through more than 8,000 yards of thread in 2 months.

Another snag I hit with this quilt was the limitation in my quilting filler designs. I loved McTavishing and Microstippling in The Duchess and Baskets in Bloom, but this is only 2 designs and for Release Your Light, I really needed more.

I began to form a theory about filler and how much of an effect these dense stitches can have for our quilts. I knew that the quilting design was going to largely depend on which fillers I chose to place on the quilt and where.

This is the basis for the new project:
365 Days of Continuous Line Quilting Filler Designs

The quilting of this quilt took a LONG time. I was hoping to have it done by July 1st, 2009 in time to enter it into the Asheville, NC quilt show. Eventually I had to come to the realization that it simply would not be done in time and this lack of pressure allowed me to finish the quilting earlier than I thought possible!

Half the center painted

First layer of colored pencil

Orange painstick right along the edge

Area filled in with 2 lighter orange colors

But remember my idea to paint the quilt after quilting it?

Usually when I bind a quilt, that's the very last step. Not so in this quilt. I was only just getting started!

I began painting the center with yellow colored pencils, but the effect really wasn't what I wanted. The quilt was turning into a big yellow banana!

So I used Shiva Paintstiks over the colored pencils to create the color variation blending smoothly from yellow to orange to red.

To protect the other areas of the quilt, I used masking tape along the lines where one design met another.

The center was finished very quickly, but the borders took forever! I had begun to realize just how big this quilt was while quilting the many rays.

Now having to paint each of them, I was doubly reminded.

With the borders, I began with the darkest color, black and sealed it before moving on to the red, yellow, and orange rays.

Each of the areas needed to be sealed before painting an adjacent ray, so it wasn't just like painting the quilt once, it was like painting it twice!

I find it almost funny now (about a month after the fact) that I seriously thought that painting this quilt would be easier than appliqué. It just goes to show that even if something sounds easier on paper, it probably isn't.

The paint and sealer also made this quilt not feel anything like a quilt. The surface feels stiff and slightly tacky. I'm certain that no paint can rub off, but the quilt will always have a paint like texture instead of feeling like fabric.

The quilting was finished in time for the quilt to be entered into the show, but the painting was not so Release Your Light was not entered.

I really have no idea how much time this quilt took to finish, but I estimate that it was somewhere between 800 - 1000 hours.

The Duchess taught me a lot about design, especially in the time consuming areas of the borders. After Release Your Light I realized that I hadn't really learned my lesson!

This quilt has taught me to take a lot more time on a design. In fact, the design process should take almost as much time as the quilting process. I rush these areas because I get so excited, I want to see the finished quilt so badly!

But it pays to chill out, take your time, and really plan every aspect of a quilt before taking off with it.

Honestly, if I could do it all over again, I probably wouldn't change anything. Release Your Light now hangs on my dining room wall and is the first and last thing I see every single day.

I feel the most attached to this quilt largely because it finished exactly the way I envisioned it in my mind.

Yes, it was challenging!

Yes, I cried a lot during the making of this quilt!

But every stitch and every hour was worth it to see the finished quilt.

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