Finishing the sky birds project

I knew the "scroll" would have to go into a box to protect it during travel, and decided to make the box into part of the work. Over the days of thinking about it, it evolved into a box that would unfold and be mirrored inside, with the poem that inspired the piece used ... somehow ...

When I started putting the box together, the first parts were easy - measure and cut the panels, and cover them with the cream silk printed with the flocks of sky birds. I used some of the silk for the hinges too -
Figuring out what to do with the base was more difficult - I made a tiny model to help. The panels are labelled to avoid yet more confusion - the narrow panel on the right has to be narrower than the one on the left so that the two fronts can overlap cleanly. The difference is 3mm - the depth of the card used for the box -
In the end I hinged just the central base to the back panel, and made a cloth to spread out under the "wings" of the piece -
The back section is ready to be joined in. It's a different colour because the piece of cream silk was the size it was - just big enough for the side panels. In fact the blue (a metallic dupion) wasn't really deep enough ... which called for the black at the bottom to be added, and black to be used for the bottom and for the embroidered cloth that unfolds from the bottom of the box.Mirror-foil lines each section -
The stitching was done from the reverse - I wrote the lines of the poem onto a piece of iron-on stabiliser, and then realised it had to be written in mirror-writing to be the right way round on the front of the fabric. Fortunately there was just enough stabiliser on the roll to write it again.

Finding a suitable bobbin thread and tension -
A fair bit of time was spent searching for the darning foot for my longshank machine, and in the end I had to do the stitching with an ordinary foot, feed dogs up, and very short stitches, stitching very slowly and using the knee lift a lot to swivel the fabric around. Blessed be the writers of short poems!
By the time I braced myself to do the stitching "the hard way" I was so rattled that I forgot to check that the writing fitted onto the obvious lines of the fabric. Hey ho, never mind!

The poet's name is hand stitched - here's the reverse, which was subsequently hidden in the hem. I hand stitched my own name onto a bit of cloth, and decided to place it onto that hem, directly behind the poet's name -
The back view -

Leaving the cloth square meant the mirrored "wings" could be adjusted to different angles if necessary.

It's a wrap!
"The Flocks of Sky Birds" will be in "Whatever Floats your Boat ..." exhibition at Slough Museum, 18 May to 11 June, open Weds-Sat 11.30-4pm. Twenty-eight members of the Thames Valley group of Contemporary Quilt are taking part.