Swirl, Sniff, Sip

Quilt content!  Bet that's a surprise, huh?  But I recently finished a submission for an exhibit on the theme of "Rituals," and I thought I'd show you. It's 24x60 inches, which is 5 feet long.  Big!

As I thought about the rituals theme, I found myself thinking about the rituals associated with wine tasting.  I live in the wine country of northern California, so the wine industry is a huge part of life here.  When we moved here, we weren't huge wine drinkers... well, no more than the average household, I'd say.  But once we settled here, we made so many friends in the wine business -- wine makers and grape growers and buyers and  tasting room employees -- most folks here have some connection to the business.  We used to joke that we were the only people on our block that didn't own our own winery, which was almost true.

In any event, our wine palates have become educated and we have learned a lot about wine without even trying.  It's a way of life here.  So I got thinking about the shapes of wine glasses, and how there are reasons for using a specific shape for a specific wine, and the steps involved in properly tasting wine... and of course, it occurred to me also that a wine bottle was the perfect base shape for this tall, vertical size! 

Here are some of the progress shots.  I started with hand-dyed fabric, onto which I stenciled a swirly grape vine.  I stitched down a bottle, then used tulle to create the effect of a transparent champagne glass.

Here it is with all three glasses in place (I was wishing I'd put that white wine glass a bit more to the left, but oh well...)  I'm very pleased at how the tulle worked to make the glasses.  Each glass is a double layer of white tulle, which I outlined with white oil pastel crayon.

Using tissue paper outlines of the words I wanted to add, I tried various placement ideas.

And I ended up here, having stitched through the tissue paper, then pulled the tissue away to paint the words on with Lumiere gold textile paint.  I love that stuff.

You can see in the finished quilt above that I add some more swirls with a stencil, painting them in with a purple-gold Lumiere paint that gives a really interesting irridescent effect, and then I machine quilted it.  As usual, I got started in with machine quilting and ended up with a pretty dense quilted texture.  Here's a close-up:

I had a very fun time making this.  Gosh, I'm in the mood for a nice glass of zinfandel.  Wonder why?