I really could not pretend that it was still May so I had to get on with some actual work in the form of basting a large customer quilt and supervising 6 DIY quilts. This did not leave much time to continue working on Iconoclast which I had hoped would be finished by now.
I made a label and hanging sleeve and tacked them to the quilt using an extra large straight stitch in bright orange thread. This proved to be far more stable than using pins so nothing could slip out of place and end up wonky.
Eventually I decided to check for stray threads and fluff and deal with that. I have a useless fluff removing sticky roller. When I roll it over the quilt the head falls off and it is tricky to remove the fluffy layer of sticky paper to get to a clean piece. I settled on the idea of vacuuming it with a small brush head instead. This is when it dawned on me that there was an issue with the wool wadding. The quilt was covered in woolly fibres, some of which it had picked up on the way, but many more were poking out of the good quality blue dyed top. I know I had the wadding the right way up so this is really annoying. I had issues with EQS wadding a few years back but I put that down to being a bad batch after being told by the company that they had not had any issues when they tested it. It is difficult to get hold of rolls of wool wadding in the UK so I did not have much choice. I hoovered away for 2 hours, picking out fuzzy fibres. This will need to be done again before it is packed up for a show. I did wonder whether a solution might be to spray the whole thing with cheap hairspray!
Another time consuming finishing touch is sewing on chips of amber in the empty diamonds with invisible thread. I could be tempted to add amber beads elsewhere except that even I don’t have that much patience. A big job that I want to do when I next have a full free day will be to sponge the entire navy reverse with gold fabric paint so it looks like lapis lazuli and also just because;)
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