Heliconia season

Here in the tropics we don’t have the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter. So I wanted to make something more related to our environment.

At the moment we are in the season of the heliconias. Yellow butterflies are seen everywhere. We are surrounded by tropical rainforest where heliconias flower in abundance: red heliconias, yellow heliconias and hanging heliconias.

I started by painting the red flowers on hand-dyed fabric and the hanging flowers on white. They are cut out and thread-painted onto a background of fabric dyed with ice-cubes. Tree shapes are torn from bark paper.

On the top part of the piece I put rainbow organza and the hanging heliconias are covered with blue and turquoise tulle, to get depth and the mysterious feeling of the rainforest.

I added a butterfly from a butterfly guirlande that I found in my stash, and at the bottom added some painted lace. I then covered the whole piece with black tulle and started quilting. I quilted two butterflies and burned away the tulle from the wings.

The last part was painting black and white lutrador and covering the black lutrador with puff paste. After drying it was painted and burnt with a soldering iron and covered with black tulle as well. Some French knots symbolize red flowers in the foreground on the lutrador.

Close-up view:

Sketchbook: