Seven Black Birds is a quilt that’s been on an outdoor photo shoot and I promised more details of its story – a few months ago.
Later is better than never, so here it is.
My friend Kathleen and I shared a love of needle turn appliqué and wanted to make a large album style quilt, each using the same pattern, but varying the fabrics. We chose the Friendship’s Garden pattern by Barb Adams and Alma Allen.
We shared the plan with other guild members and soon had 20 or more members each making her own version of this project. At one of our guild’s quilt shows, nine completed quilts made from this pattern were hung together so that visitors could see how individuals personalized their own creations from one common pattern.
I kept detailed photos of my work in progress, so I can share some of my design process through the story of this quilt.
I found a toile fabric in soft shades of brown for my background. The country scenes in the toile seemed to fit the mood of the pattern and I chose rich reds, greens, and browns for the appliqué.
Before I was done, the primitive birds in the pattern had been replaced with more sophisticated ones, and I put a blackbird in every wreath in the design. The one with the nest and its contents inspired the title. I love to watch people try to find all seven birds.
I made all the sashing blocks (half-square triangles) the pattern described, but when I put them on the design wall, they seemed to overpower my appliqué. In this photo, some of those triangles have been stitched together, others are just clinging to the design wall.
I redesigned the sashing in a few different ways, auditioned those, and chose the “on-point” strips of squares.
The original sashing pieces were added to the back, making that construction more complex than the front. But I love it! This quilt is often displayed on a ladder in the den, and the back is the side turned “out” as much as the front. The photo above shows the entire back of the quilt as it was hanging at the Ga National Fair.
I quilted the big assembly (it finished at 84″ square) on my faithful Bernina home machine. Using a 50-weight, two-ply cotton thread I danced with my sewing machine. (I’ve written many posts describing my free motion quilting technique, and if you put that phrase in the search box on the right side of this page, you will find many references. Perhaps the process has been described in the most detail here.)
This quilt was finished in 2009. The photos are from several cameras, some indoors, some out. That’s why the colors seem so different. The earlier post with photos at The Farm House Restaurant is here.
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