Putting it Together

After finishing the top (which I described here), I had to piece together a back to fit. I wanted it to be nice enough to use as the top side if they didn't want to have all the messages on display all the time. And I wanted it to also tie in with their wedding theme. So I pieced the words, Faith, Hope, Love. (Even though I didn't want to blog about this quilt until they had seen it, I did have a post about piecing the letters.) They are on a lighter olive fabric, and surrounded by a very large floral.

On the frame, last November. I chose to use a wool batt, because although I usually like the crinkly look you get with cotton batts, I thought it might make it harder to read the hand-written notes. I outlined the 3 white columns, adding a 'swoosh' through each patch to tack it down. 

There are echoed leaves in the negative space on the sides of the quilt, and echoed blossoms on the two inner columns. The wool batting really gave this some wonderful texture.

After completing the quilting, draped across the frame.

 

The completed back of the quilt. It was a little traumatic sending this to the happy couple. I sent it Priority Mail a week ago Tuesday, and it was supposed to arrive by Thursday. Following the tracking, it flew from Seattle to New York on Wednesday, but then got missent to Long Island. It came back to the city on Friday, but it was marked as delivered on Saturday and Emily didn't have it. After several days agonizing, it finally showed up on Tuesday. 

Linking to Finish it up Friday on Crazy Mom Quilts, because it's really finally finished!

Evolving a Quilt

When my niece Emily and Seb announced their wedding date, I knew I wanted to make them a quilt. I just didn't know what kind. I did know it would be nice to have signatures of their wedding guests, so I got yards of Kona Snow and researched some of the fabric pens available. After doing some testing, including running some test swatches through the laundry, Pentel's Gel Roller for Fabric in blue got the call.

At the wedding party, I set the fabric and pens out on a table. Jill had made a nice sign, and Seb's brothers Samuel and Simon made several announcements encouraging people to contribute. I'm not sure what all they said, but there was much more than just names: congratulations (in several languages), poems, jokes, drawings...

I brought it home and thought long and hard about what to do. The differing sizes of the patches, plus the different densities of writing within them, made me really struggle with what to do. I had some early ideas of doing a more or less traditional design, but I was starting to see more and more modern quilts on blogs and thought I should do a modern quilt for a modern couple. I came up with a rough design I really liked, but couldn’t figure out how to translate it into fabric. Plus when I cut apart the patches, it became apparent that they were too big and too varied for that design concept. (Maybe I’ll make it some day…)

I usually use Electric Quilt for playing with quilt designs, but it isn't all that useful in improvisational designs. Maybe some people don’t need to design an improvisational quilt at all, but I felt like I needed some structure before just sewing random pieces together. So I went back to graph paper, and roughed out the bones of the design. I also used it to estimate the finished size, and sketch in potential quilting designs. Once I had column sizes, I could start cutting the background fabric (Kona Olive) to go with the sig patches.

I wanted staggered rows to look like stacks of cards, arranging the patches to get a good distribution by how much writing was on each. I didn't want all the drawings clustered together, for example.

Here I'm getting the rows sewn together with olive background between them. It's looking a little blah though. I had several patches reserved for each background swath, and decided to border those in blues for a little extra punch.

Design Wall 10/8

I've wanted to try making letters in fabric for a long time. I've got patterns, a book (Word Play Quilts), but it always seemed a little daunting. I got the book out again last week, and just played with it. I have some trouble being completely wonky and improvisational, but then again, I'm not that precise either. It was fun to see recognizable letters emerge! This took about an hour.