Art Quilts Around The World : Flights of Fantasy - Neroli Henderson

For flights of Fantasy my first thought was to make a dragon quilt as I've always wanted to try creating one out of painted and bubbled Tyvek - I think the scales would look great in that. However I recently wrote an artist statement to keep my recent body of work more cohesive this year, and it occurred to me that a Phoenix would fit within that and then be a quilt with a much deeper meaning for me personally.

'Phoenix' - layered synthetics on Mylar film and painted cotton

A Phoenix is a mythological creature that bursts into flame and is reborn from it's own ashes, so for this piece I wanted to use a layered, burned technique.

I drew up my design and then painted some red fabric with sheer coats of metallic paints in gold and coppers for the background. I cut the phoenix out of Mylar film and fused this down to the base and then covered the entire front with a layer of black organza and black chiffon. I then stitched the Phoenix and the quilting around it and burnt the entire piece back with a heat gun before scoring with a soldering iron and over stitching with a metallic thread.

The picture below is before I heat gunned away some of the two layers of sheer black fabrics.

'Phoenix' before being heat gunned

After heat gunning I really didn't think he was going to work out for awhile - heat gunning can always be a hit and miss technique as you never can tell exactly how the fabrics and stitching densities are going to react. I lost a lot of the definition of the bird body to start with and had to resurrect it by defining his shape with scored soldering iron marks and outlining in a metallic thread.

After the burning and overstitching:

Phoenix close up

The next two pictures show lines I've scored in using the soldering iron:

'Phoenix' detail - the tail features lines scored into the surface using a soldering iron.

And last the neon green under the wing is present throughout the whole of the Phoenix body - but only visible from some angles of view and not straight on, so you can't see much of it in the main photo.