Out Of This World - Andrea Dodds - "River"

I call this "River". My inspiration for this quilt was the short-run science fiction show "Firefly".

If you are familiar with the show then you know that River, one of the characters, is being hunted by officials that travel "two by two with hands of blue". Therefore I wanted the quilt to have two blue hands. I tried very hard to bleach out an area on black fabric in which to then paint blue hands, but all the black fabrics that I tried would bleach to a rust color, which wouldn't work well with blue. So, I had to go the other direction and dye white fabric black and use a resist for the hands. Here is the first pass with just the resist (I used Elmer's glue).

I then dyed the piece with black Rit dye:

Washed out the resist and dyed the whole piece again with blue Rit dye:

After the fabric dried, the black portion was more of a dark denim color so I mixed up some more black dye and went back over that portion trying to darken it up (even though it never did get as dark as I wanted it). After it was all dried, I ironed the heck out of it and quilted it with a variegated black thread. I wanted the quilting to look like a river of stars flowing through the galaxy. After the quilting, I went back over the hands with a sparkly blue textile paint and took a black pen and wrote out the theme song to the show along with some of the most oft used quotes from the show: 

I had the best time experimenting with the use of dyes and exploring different paths and techniques on this quilt and am now focusing on the next challenge.