Kesa

At the 'quilten speciaal' course we had to make a Kesa. A Kesa is a large shawl (?). In ancient times in Japan, Buddhist people wore one. Yesterday I saw a newspaper picture of Chinese monks and they wore one too.

A Kesa surrounds you. It is a mandala with yourself in the centre of it. There is a traditional way to design one, the more columns in your Kesa for instance the more important you are (the emperor has got 25 columns) and even there is a 'formula'about measures. That is because not every one has the same length. A Kesa has to be sown by hand.

cotton painted with dye-na-flow, pebeo setacolor shimmer,
on top painted polyester voile

Because there was only little time to make one, it is not made to measure.
I made a small Kesa 50x65 cm.

Traditionaly the columns have to be sown by hand. I used bondaweb (...). On top of the Kesa I used a few stitches to show that these stitches are the proper ones to sew the piece together, only I used it for embroidery.

A few details of the piece:

and this one

and the back!

Take a look at other quilten speciaal students' weblog and see what they have done with the assignment
Marloes: http://textielverfenderest.web-log.nl/textielverfenderest/2009/07/kesa.html
Marjon: http://marjonquilt.blogspot.com/2009/06/kesa.html
Sandra: http://madebysandra.blogspot.com/2009/06/quilten-speciaal.html
Marion: http://marionartquilts.web-log.nl/marion_artquilts/2009/06/de-laatste-opdr.html

ONE less!

Velvet dyed with Procion MX, cotton painted with acrylics, coloured bondaweb and paper, machine embroidery

This summer I intend to finish all my projects that are not finished yet. And there are a lot of them (who hasn't?). But even then I have to make a choice which one will have the honour and which one won't. Simply because there are too many of them.

This one won't. I always wanted to make a backing for it, but I will leave it like this.
Up to the next one!