This is my most recently finished quilt. It isn’t the greatest photo of it because I thought I could either wait until I could get a great shot or write the post and the latter won.
There are a few things which I think are interesting about this quilt.
- Although it is made from new fabric it is a memory quilt. I bought the charm pack squares when the very lovely Marybeth Stalp was over last year and we were touring quilt shops in the South West for our research project. So it immediately reminds me of Marybeth and the great time we had together. Then I stitched a lot of the very simple four patch blocks together in Copenhagen hotel rooms as I was doing my academic work over there. So it reminds me of that and of what I think of as my Scandi family who live in Copenhagen.
- It is what Jane Brocket calls a ‘Collection Quilt’. This is a modern quilting possibility when you use all the fabrics in one particular manufacturer or designer’s collection. In this case it is Nocturne by Janet Clare. I absolutely loved the fabrics in this collection. I wasn’t that keen on the neutral blenders, but I loved all the ‘feature’ fabrics and the indigo colourway in particular. All the colourways blended in this collection so that was good. I think this is an interesting modern development. Many quilters now have the disposable income to buy a piece of an entire collection, and Moda in particular caters for this with its precut packs. Jelly rolls seem to encapsulate this small piece of all of them approach to me. It’s a bit like the tasting menu or the assiette of desserts. I quite like the bountiful and indulgent feel of it sometimes.
- The quilt is hand pieced but has a lot of machine work. I decided to use a Janet Clare-type technique on a Janet Clare range of fabrics by applying the large pink batik circles. This is not Janet Clare fabric. In fact, it was some bargain batik that I picked up at a Quilters Area Day. The blue-y undertones of the pink seemed to fit with the yellow-y blues of the patchwork fabric. I used bondaweb and cut the circles with my Sizzix machine (a die cutting machine) and then top stitched them on with Mettler black quilting thread. Mettler is definitely my favourite thread at the moment because it is really smooth and strong.
I thought the batik looked like the gas clouds on Jupiter. You can also see the long-arm quilting pattern done at Midsomer Quilting, which looks like orbits to me particularly on the second grey patch at the bottom left. This is a good example of the quilting enhancing the design, I think:
The quilting design is called champagne, which I also like.
I remember once reading the tongue in cheek but nevertheless sage advice somewhere that you should never make art about menstruation. This quilt does have red moons which is inescapable symbolism. I like to think of it, however, as a liberatory, Thank God all that’s over quilt, rather than let’s embrace our femininity and squat in a red tent, sort of piece.
Finally, I like the simplicity of this quilt. It is a medallion quilt, made up entirely of strips and squares, very simple to do on the move by hand. I have been doing some very traditional quilting recently and have really enjoyed it. I will be posting some more pictures soon.
