Creating oversized fabric wall art
When you work in a home office that doubles as your sewing room/ craft room and general hang-out zone on evenings and weekends, I think it’s natural to get bored of your surroundings and to enjoy changing things up. So while I was recovering from the flu last weekend, I couldn’t resist the urge to move around some furniture and create interesting new wall art.
A couple of months back I’d ordered a Kona colour chart fabric panel for $9 at an online fabric store. It was printed with hundreds of tiny squares of vivid colour, each labelled with a name like Aloe or Lime or Champagne. Quilters use these charts to decide which fabrics they’ll use for a specific project. But I had a plan to turn it into wall art.
I ironed it carefully to get it as smooth as possible, trimmed it and took the measurements, and then enlisted my handy husband to build a lightweight frame from 1x2s. I planned to staple the fabric panel behind the frame, which I’d either paint black or white, or maybe stain a rich walnut.
There was, uh, some marital miscommunication somewhere along the way and the frame he built was too large. Wisely, I didn’t complain. I just sewed some strips of white fabric to the edges of the panel to make it larger, and wrapped it around the frame so I could staple it at the back. It ended up looking even better than it would have with a frame on the front, so it was a happy accident.
I loved my colour chart so much that I decided there must be something else I could make for the walls. I thought about the quilt top I’d been slowly working away on for the last couple of years. Did I want to give up adding to it, and hang it on the wall instead?
I dug it out and it was smaller than I remembered, for all the work that was involved. You see, I have a worn-out cardboard rectangle (cut from a beer box) that measures exactly two-and-a-halfinches square. Whenever I have a scrap of fabric from a project that isn’t really big enough to save, I trace as many squares onto it as I can. I stick them in a plastic bin with hundreds of other squares, and occasionally I sew them into random quilt squares.
I did a quick length-times-width calculation and the quilt top was currently 704 squares. It was a nice large rectangle, and I decided immediately that I didn’t care to keep adding to it. I’d much prefer it hanging on the wall, so I asked my handy husband to put together a second wooden frame from 1x2s. (It was at this point that he grumbled a bit.)
Once I had my second wooden frame, I laid the quilt top on the carpet, ironed it well, and placed the wooden frame on the back. I decided not to staple it in place, in case I changed my mind someday and wanted to quilt it after all. Instead, I began the tedious process of weaving thread across the back — side to side, top to bottom — pulling the edges tight around the frame.
It was thrilling to hang both huge pieces of fabric art on the wall in my home office. They’re each about a foot from the ceiling, so they really draw your eye upward and make the basement feel taller.
The tiny squares of colour and pattern in the quilt are mesmerizing, and there’s something about the perfect rainbow order in the colour chart that’s very soothing. Between both pieces, there’s more than 1,000 little squares of fabric in more than 400 different colours. Colour me happy!