Sun on the Sea

The crazy quilt I mentioned last has served as a dramatic focal point for anyone entering the house, but after two years I thought it might be time for a change.

Voila! I’ve finally finished the quilt I’m calling “Sun on the Sea”. I know it’s totally pretentious to name my quilts but it helps with the illusion that I’m and artist.

I am a huge fan of embellishment, which is a way to add layers of detail to a piece. For this quilt I combined traditional quilt piecing and stippling (more about that here), with appliqué, thread painting, and embroidery.

The body of the quilt is composed of two by two inch squares (1½ x 1 ½ finished) of Kona Cottons solids by Robert Kaufman Fabrics. Though I bought larger pieces, something like the Classic Kona Cotton Solids Charm Pack - Robert Kaufman Fabrics would work well for a project like this. The entire background area is stippled and varies from dark turquoise and green “sea water” at the bottom to blue “sky” and light fluffy clouds at the top. Overlaid on this background is a large sun appliqué composed of a round center and sixteen rays. In addition I used thread painting techniques to add additional rays and then outlined and bisected some of the rays with stem stitch embroidery.

This project was a learning process for me, especially in the area of thread painting, a technique I’m just beginning to learn. I learned that thread painting and embroidery needs to be done on the quilt top prior to layering with batting and backing. And, if possible, the work should be done on small pieces that are joined later. Thread painting on a full or queen sized quilt top involves manipulating a large and heavy piece of fabric which can be quite a challenge.

This quilt make no less a dramatic statement than my crazy quilt did for those entering our home. Don’t expect this one to stay up here for two years though. I have a spare bedroom that is calling for this quilt on the bed, and ideas for a dozen more quilts in my head.

Crazy About Quilts

For the past couple of years I’ve had my crazy quilt (a tribute to the needlecraft of the women in my family), hanging in my living room. Growing up I was fascinated by a crazy quilt my mother had. It had belonged to her mother, and was composed of several sections; perhaps one was made by each woman in the family and these were assembled into a bed sized quilt. Such a quilt would have been made as a wedding gift or trousseau piece and intended for display in a parlor. If made for my grandmother, that would date it to the turn of the century, though I don’t know for sure how she came to have it. Womenfolk.com offers an interesting article on how this style of quilting caught on in this country during the Victorian era.

Though I knew I would someday end up with my grandmother’s quilt, it was already too fragile to display, so I thought to reproduce it. Not long before my mother died I visited her and took pictures of her quilt and began planning my project.  I bought bundles of fabric on E-bay, cut up old clothing and purchased more new fabric too.

My quilt, pictured here sharing the room with our Christmas tree, is composed of sixteen squares. Each sixteen inch square is a traditional crazy patchwork with embroidered seams. 

In the center of each square is a black silk velvet patch with an embroidered vignette. Several of these are replicas of embroidered motifs on my grandmother’s quilt. The others are just images that appealed to me. 

In the center of the quilt I embroidered a thistle and a harp. These are the national symbols of Scotland and Ireland respectively, the two predominant nationalities in my somewhat mongrel ancestry.

The finished quilt is 82 x 82 inches, and made of silk satins, dupoini, and velvets. The backing is plain cotton. Each of the crazy quilt squares is worked onto medium weight muslin. Given the weight of the fabric and stitching, and the fact that the piece was intended more for show than use, I skipped batting. Still this is the heaviest quilt I’ve ever made.

With all the handwork (every stitch and decoration in the quilt was done by hand), it took me more than two years to finish. Sadly my mother never did see it, but I think she would have approved. In addition to everything else she taught me, she gave me my first lessons in embroidery back in the late 60s. Back then I employed this knowledge to embellish blue jeans and army surplus jackets. I think she might find this quilt a more fitting use of my “womanly skills”.

I have Issues!

A whole month has passed without a post. I have been busy working on that dratted quilt but I've had some issues. I decided to do quite a lot of thread painting around the sun appliqué.
Thread painting is a technique, typically applied to a quilt top (or other work) before batting and backing are added. Basically one uses different colors and shades of thread to create a design or image on the piece. Some can be quite detailed, and to achieve these effects, most crafters will want to use free motion quilting. However, I just wanted to create some additional rays of sun that were more subtle than the ones rendered in fabric. As a result, I used my trusty 1950's straight stitch Singer set on the longest stitch and about a dozen different colors of Gutermann thread. Gutermann is expensive by comparison to something like Coats & Clark, but for a project like this, it's well worth it to me. I find it is much less likely to break and split. I also chose all cotton thread because all of the other components of the quilt are cotton. Did you know that polyester thread can saw away at the cotton fibers in a quilt causing them to break down and tear? That's why even quilter's polyester threads are usually cotton wrapped poly.  Anyway I'm honestly quite happy with the result so far.
My next decision was to stipple virtually everything else on the quilt. What was I thinking? Stippling is a technique of free motion quilting that is generally used for background areas. Because the stitching is very dense and close together, it tends to make those sections lie flat and recede, while other areas are more puffed up and noticeable. However, I decided that along with this quilt being a blend of many different small blocks of fabric from different shades of the same color families, I would continue this impressionistic approach and use different shades of threads to blend one area into another.
I might have underestimated just a tad on the amount of labor I was letting myself in for. I've quilted on this project for many hours over the past two weeks and I still have about a third of the quilt to go. Not only that, I ran into a real snag with my stippling technique.
Basically stippling is like meander except that the lines are never supposed to cross and the stitching lines are much closer together - typically 1/4 inch or less. Well I went great guns for several hours a day for several days and all of a sudden the machine started skipping stitches.
What was wrong with my machine? Believe me I was deep into the inner workings of my machine - completely dismantled the tension assembly and put it back together - before I decided that the problem was me. Just like with knitting and crochet, the tension of the quilter will have an effect on the quilt. Nothing had changed with the machine - same tension, settings, bobbin and top thread, etc. But from one day to the next, I was more tense. As a result my motions moving the quilt under the free motion darning foot were faster and more jerky. What you want is slow, and smooth with nice little tight loops. Once I figured that out, I decided to set the project aside for a few days and work on something else. Next up I'll post about the project I used to relax and put me back in the mood to quilt. And hopefully by then I'll be closer to a finished quilt too.

Little Pieces: A Song by Gomez, and My Quilt

I was listening to this song today and it made me think of the current quilt project.

Part of the lyric for the Gomez song Little Pieces

Though you try your best you never find

There are pieces that are left behind

Last piece of the jigsaw

While the others are scattered across the floor

So you try to get them all up

There are pieces falling in the dust

That’s the way this one has felt for many days, but I am finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Today I finally reduced over 3000 two by two inch squares into 195 six inch blocks.

Now to scatter them on the floor, much like a jigsaw, and figure out just how they should go together.

That’s a pretty bad photo with the sun spot causing glare, but you get the idea.

If you remember, my vision looked something like this. I think it shaping up, but really it’s still to early to tell. How will it all end?

Working with Stablizers: The Embroidered Gauze Shawl Revisited

Remember the gauze shawl I was nattering on about back at the beginning of May? Well I finished it a couple of weeks ago. Of course now it is far too warm in Atlanta to even think about a shawl, but it will be ready for fall. Wish I had a pretty model to help with the photos - or even a dress form for that matter, but alas, I don't.

I did end up sewing two pieces of fabric together to cover all the ugly knots, and to keep from catching threads on rings and things. And, since the fabric has a really nice ravely selvage, I decided to leave the piece with a raveled edge all the way around, which gives it a really soft look.

As I mentioned in the earlier post about this project, when working with something as flimsy as gauze, stabilizer is essential. There are three basic stabilizer types for embroidery. First there are sheets of paper-like fabric that is intended to be torn away from the stitching after the project is complete. I decided this would be a problem since the tearing with such a lightweight fabric and delicate stitching could stretch everything out of shape.

The other two alternatives are a water soluble roll of fabric that is layered on the back of the piece and washes away by soaking in water or machine washing, and a spray-on type of stabilizer that also washes out after the piece is finished. I decided to try both – one on each end of the shawl. For the spray on I used PerfectSew liquid wash-away stabilizer, and used Sulky water soluble roll stabilizer on the other. My conclusion is that I far prefer the liquid spray on product. The Sulky roll does stabilize well enough, but if you aren’t very careful it will bunch up and shift around. With PerfectSew you simply spray it on to saturate the fabric then wait for it to dry. You can accelerate drying time with a blow dryer. Once you iron it with a dry iron to remove the last bits of moisture, you are set with a stiff piece of fabric ready for the hoop.

The particular fabric I used is called bubble gauze, which means that it has been treated to shrink up and be really crinkly when washed. However, the washing did some interesting things to the stitching. Since the fabric shrank up and the thread didn’t, what was a tight row of stitches is now quite loose and a bit loopy. I’ve decided I like it, but let me know what you think.

Next up? I have a beautiful piece of red bubble gauze. I think I’ll try some machine embellishment on that. Metallic thread would make something pretty for the holidays.