I don’t visit quilt shops much anymore. I have plenty of fabric on hand and I really love using the vintage fabric more than commercially produced quilt fabric. But the new lines of fabric are sometimes irresistible and I have a new quilt to prove that.
On a visit to a local quilt shop in search of border fabric for a project, a glorious panel of fabric caught my eye. Flowers in a jar….my favorite kind of arrangement. Simple. Pure. Country Life. I bought it along with a couple of yards of coordinating fabric for the back. My thoughts were, “I’ll just baste this with batting, sit down and quilt it and have a quick lovely quilt.” Right.
I came home and looked up the fabric online (Adel in Autumn by Sandy Gervais) just to see what others had done with it. I stumbled on a blogpost by piccolo studio.com and saw her quilt. Oh, my! I had to do my version of that.
I love raw edges in my art pieces, but not so much in traditional quilts. And, I am not a fan of fusible appliqué. But that seemed the only way to go with this.
After days of laborious cutting, I was ready to attach it to my background (pieced with an inner border of the coordinating fabric), and quilt.
I did free motion machine appliqué on the flowers and vase first, to secure all layers. I planned to echo the design all the way to the edges, but filling all that negative space was going to result in nearly straight lines near the edge. So I added more stems and leaves and berries in the center to echo around, giving more bumps and curves for detail in the quilting.
I used some 30 wt threads both on the appliqué and in the added stems. Echo quilting is done with 100 wt silk thread. In this photo, you see that even with the added stems for echo quilting, I resorted to my irregular freemotion grid to complete the quilting to the edges.
When it came time to add a label, it was obvious. I had this sweet multicolored dotted fabric that looked like the contents of a canning jar. I used watercolor crayons to paint the lid and add some shading on the sides of the jar (more about painting on fabric here).
This quilt went with us on a recent outing to nearby state parks. It was quite showy in the fresh air…just like the flowers depicted on it.
The quilt is a large wall hanging, or lap quilt. It measures 48″ x 53″.