Sacred Threads! and New Work

I'm so thrilled that my quilt, The Stories of Women Are Told in Their Hands was accepted into Sacred Threads 2009. This is of the hands of my mother, myself, my daughter, and my granddaughter. Steve took the photo of all of our hands on the coffee table on a piece of fabric. Our hands weren't entwined. I desaturated them in PhotoShope, posterized them, then colored them. I printed them out individually on fabric, stitched them down to the background and threadpainted them. I created "continents" on the background with free motion threadpainting and stitched that to the night sky background. Then I stuffed the "earth" from behind to make it 3D.


I have been wanting to paint Wonder Under after watching Pokey Bolton do it so effortlessly on her Quilt Art Workshop dvd, so I tried it using Lumiere paints. It wasn't quite so effortless for me. The WU wouldn't come off the paper without the fusing. After ironing one piece again, the paper backing wouldn't come off the fusible & fabric except in small sections. Very disappointing and frustrating. Some of the people on SAQA digest suggested trying other fusibles (most of them hadn't had problems with WU so it must have been a bad batch.) I did manage to pull enough small sections off the paper backing to fuse it to a piece of hand-dyed fabric and it was pretty cool. I decided to put some beads on it, but I haven't beaded much and this is as far as I've gotten with that. Where to go from here?


I wanted to try painting Misty Fuse, which I love anyway and today I painted some on a piece of parchment paper. It was like a dream! And the bonus was that the paint that stayed on the parchment paper was wiped onto a paper towel and now I have that for my paper stash - for someday. Here's the MF painted and fused.


I've been doing a lot of doodling with pen and ink - mostly at work, go figure. I've been looking back at them and trying to figure out how to work them into fabric. Here's one of the doodles I decided to play with:

I saw on a website somewhere - Zentangle - where they create boxes connected together and doodle inside them, sometimes connecting the doodles from box to box. It's really fun and easier to play with on a small scale. So - I took one of the doodles from that box and enlarged it, then traced it onto fabric twice. On one I painted it with Golden Acrylic paint and still have to stitch it:


And the other I stitched and am considering how to paint or finish it. Not sure yet. But it was fun playing with them.

Any suggestions on how to finish this?