"Class picture" (2007)

My daughter and grandson are moving house this weekend, so I thought I should do something really useful, like creating a blog.
I had great fun playing with the blog settings, and thought it might be appropriate to start with the quilt from my heading.

“Class picture” is one of my favourite quilts, partly because it’s a scrap quilt, but also because it’s very personal. It started out as a hand appliqué project when I needed some hand work to go, and just grew from there.

The scrappy tan background blocks were sewn into rows, and the ovals arranged into groups of similar colours. I really got into the whole hand appliqué thing, so it didn’t take long to get the rows finished. Then nothing, nothing, nothing, until one day I got the idea to make faces, and a class picture, out of them. The rows worked better as columns, so the whole thing was turned around.
I quilted the background rather heavily before I wrote between the rows. Every single letter is freehanded 6 times, so it took a while. The eyes and ears were hand embroidered very roughly at last.
The quilt was a part of the exhibition at Festival Of Quilts in Birmingham, England in 2007. My first:-)