Batique Out Of Hell

OK, I have to admit that while I was working on this I kept thinking about Meatloaf. (The rock musician, not the foodstuff.)

We have reached March 2004 and this is another "Patchworks Challenge" for Macmillan Cancer Support. The set fabrics were pieces of Batik prints.

Sometimes the brain makes odd little connections that lead to a design. In this case it sort of went; Batik is a method of screen printing from the far east. I once watched it being done in a factory in Malaysia and it's a fascinating process. Each colour is added separately by silk screen printing, then hung out to dry, so when you visit the factory there are yards and yards of cloth at different stages of completion hanging over rails.
From Batik my musings brought me to another eastern icon, the bat, a symbol of good luck. Of course I didn't stop there. I've always had a soft spot for bad Vampire movies, particularly those from Hammer Films where they would often use stock footage of bats leaving their cave at night and flying off into the moonlight (no doubt to visit Count Dracula).
These all came together in my mind and I ended up with the idea of stylised bats coming out of a dark cave in the bottom left, and climbing into the light of a full moon. (It's always a full moon in the best, or is it worst, Vampire movies).

Each bat is created from four uneven quadrilaterals. I had to draw and cut my own templates for those. The fabric was basted onto papers cut from the templates and joined in sets of four, two wings and two parts of the body. The central 'bat' motifs were worked using the challenge fabrics, I added the dark brown fabric from my stash, cutting it into random sized blocks and curving it to be the top of the cave entrance while the mottled green became the bushes hiding the mouth of the cave. It was all put together with wadding and backing and quilted along the outline of each bat . The binding came from my stash.

I had been getting asked the 'how long did it take?' question in recent times and had always had to admit that I didn't know, so with Batique Out Of Hell I decided to keep a note. It took 130 hours between March and May 2004. I now keep a note of how long any piece takes, and the materials used.