Scenes from daily life
Oven-drying some spiced tomatoes.
Fresh herbs from my tiny container garden and the farmer’s market.
Tomato, basil and caramelized onion pizza with Jeremy’s homemade dough.
Summer is the time for really overdoing it on fruit-eating.
I don’t understand why she thinks a face plant into biking shoes is comfortable for sleeping.
A few flowers to liven up the place.
The Mom Quilt – Finished!
Dear Mom,
Your quilt is finished! When the rain lets up, I’ll roll it up in a plastic bag and put it in a tube with a dowel rod to hang it on and mail it to you. I feel terrible it’s more than a month since I promised it to you, but it’s not like I haven’t been late before. I consider it a family tradition! And I have been working on it very hard. I didn’t really expect it to take this long!
You might have to iron it a little with low heat when you get it, but it’s pretty indestructible at this point. One reasons I find quilting with silks like this so interesting is that it gives the impression of being a delicate sort of thing but as I’ve said before, silk is not really delicate. Most of the silk I’ve worked with is tough – I’ve broken sewing machine needles and when I embroider it forces me to use leather thimbles and needle grippy things or I dent my fingers. Plus the overall project, because it’s quilted so densely, is extremely sturdy. You’ll see. It’s a thick piece of work.
A few weeks ago when you wrote me, Mom, you said you didn’t see how I had enough patience to do this. Truth is that it doesn’t take me any patience. It might be weird, but I can’t sit still long enough to hand-hem a pair of pants, but I can spent 50 hours hand-quilting. It doesn’t feel like tedium, and I don’t get impatient. I love sitting down and putting stitches in this fabric. It’s fun. I even ripped out quilting I didn’t like in some places and started over. I’ve definitely found something that I love to do.
I’ll miss this quilt. I ended up liking it quite a bit, and the pictures just aren’t the same as seeing it in person. There is too much depth and texture to it to really get a good idea of what it’s like in a picture. But then again, I’ve been looking at this so long that I don’t see the picture for the details anymore. In a couple of weeks I”ll look at it again and see if I can see the flowers and leaves again. But I think I need some time away from it first.
Have fun with it when you get it!
Details:
Neutral oatmeal linen backing fabrics (2 layers), thin cotton batting, silk kimono fabrics from Ah! Kimono.
Needlepoint, Inc. silk floss and DMC floss (what’s that stuff made of?) for quilting.
Hand quilted/embroidered and machine and hand pieced. Hand bound.
Posts for this project:
Concave and Convex, Iris quilt: creating the quilt puzzle pt. 1, Iris quilt 2: fabric piecing technique, Iris quilt 3: putting it all together, The back speaks, The Mom Quilt – Finished!
Iris quilt 3: putting it all together
Okay, so when I left it last time I had all the leaves and sky background sewn together, and the flowers were pieced. It’s time to start putting the whole thing together at last.
Holes in my piecing
One of the most difficult parts of this quilt was getting all of the individually pieced sections put together. There were 5-6 sections that I pieced first, and getting them together and aligning all the seams and flowers was more of an art than a science, definitely.
After I got it all pinned out on the foam, I placed the flowers temporarily to make sure everything was going to work out. It was a bit weird to see the quilt with holes in it where pieces looked like they ought to be. I discovered during this audit that I needed to add in extra pieces here and there, and I had to rip some more seams since I was having problems with some leaves not lining up between the sections. Plus I discovered two problems where my original pattern had sort of gone awry because I’d colored it wrong and therefore used the wrong fabric – big d’oh! Still, it went together almost like I wanted it to.
I spent two nights fixing problems that appeared so that everything lined up and my flowers would fit. You can see this does-it-fit process below.
But eventually all the problems were fixed, the leaf and sky pieces were all pieced, and the flowers were pieced together. It was time to finish up the pieces prior to getting on with the embroidery. In order to finish putting it together I had to stabilize the pieces.
Stabilizing & Applique
This quilt when it’s done will be four layers: quilt top, linen, felt, linen. The first thing I did when the piecing was done was to baste the quilt top to a piece of linen with my favorite quilt basting spray (it’s re-positionable and not permanent). This stabilized the top layer so I could applique the flowers, and made it all nice and flat and less slippery.
For the flowers, I turned all the raw edges under to create a narrow seam and hand-basted them (you can see it below – right alongside one of the 400 episodes of The Closer I watched while doing this project!). Then I pressed the seams down so they’d stay put. Then I stuck some small pieces of Steam-A-Seam under the middle of each flower and placed the flowers appropriately on the top of the quilt, covering each hole in the piecing. Then I ironed each of the flowers, thereby permanently fusing the flowers to the linen underneath the quilt top.
After getting it all in place, I appliqued all the flowers on by hand using iiittty biiittty tiny stitches around the edges. Luckily, about the time I finished that my mother was actually around, so I could show it to her!! She thought that they were irises immediately, which was extremely gratifying.
The last stage (which I am currently working on) is using my typical quilting/embroidering process to give the thing proper quilting texture and fuse the four layers properly. I’ve started and nearly done with the leaves and stems, and lastly will quilt/embroider the flowers. Finally after that comes the border! I suppose I have another week or so of work to finish it up.
Whew. I’ll photo up the project when it’s done and post more about it. Hopefully with some decent lighting! Let me know what you think of it so far if you’ve managed to read all the way through all this nattering on!
