The Joy of Quilting

The quilt that is shown below (60" wide by x80"long) is an unusual quilt just for the reason that it was created in an unusual way. The big circle/medallion, a former skirt in its previous life, was fit to be attached to a rectangle of fabric, and not just any fabric but a piece of material hand dyed to achieve a funky kind of green you can't find in commercial fabrics. The color in the first photo is the actual green-sage-yellowish.
The binding around the circle is store bought bias tape just zig-zaged to secure it to the background material.

The writing on the quilt was cut out of a piece of black material and attached to the main body of the quilt with an embroidered stitch. By the way, the writing Bienvenido, means welcome in Spanish, and indeed this quilt was welcome by me to be machine quilted. When I first saw the quilt, made by Mary M. a member of my Austin Fiber Artist group, I had no idea how to approach the quilting. Mary suggested I stitch-trace the scene depicted inside the circle and that gave me a starting point. It was fun to be recreating the scenery with stitches, but once I started quilting it just kept asking for more and more and more! The problem with quilting is that once you heavy quilt a good size surface you can't leave areas unquilted because they just pop up like little tents so I really had to quilt this quilt to death.



Outside the circle I opted for a non-traditional quilting design. The quilt was just begging for it and I free motion quilted a maze pattern. To break up the quilting design of the main body I decided to do some more free motion around the letters but something in the opposite shape so circular motifs were called for.



For this area of the quilt I quilted a very simple series of lines on the inner circle and a leaf motif on the brown and black design.

Quilting this quilt was a lot of fun and very liberating and seeing Mary's surprised face when she saw the finished product just made my day.