"Soft treasures"

This quilt did not make its way into the world easily, so with a late-but-big Tah Dah, I give you "Soft treasures" (Jan 2014, 65*77cm)

With all the fabrics and notions available to us quilters, it is easy to lose track of the simple joy of creating your own images, so I wanted to go in the other direction using only solid black fabric and colourful thread, and techniques from my free motion quilting class, Quilta Figurer.

The quilt is free motion quilted in various patterns and hand embroidered. Extra texture and depth have been added by playing with the thread tension and adding just a few lines with fabric crayons.

Those of you who read this blog, know that it took more than a few experiments to get the colours

and techniques

and stitches right.

Those of you who do free motion quilting, know that it takes more than a few hours to do such dense quilting.

Those of you who do hand stitching, know that it takes more than a few days to do this much hand stitching.

It did indeed take quite a lot of work to finish the quilt, but the competition for which it was made got cancelled, and after a lot of mishaps on the way to an exhibition, it was finally showed at a “Show & tell”, for half a minute, in a very poorly lit hall, 100 feet away, all crinkled and horrible. Tah dah. I felt crinkled and horrible too.

Hopefully I’ll feel better about the quilt when it gets unpacked in the new house. Maybe I’ll want to take properly lit pictures. At least I can use it as a sample in future Quilta Figurer classes.

I'll keep you updated..