Fluttering through Time

That is the title of the quilt (16.5" square) I made for the challenge issued by the Thistle Quilters. The challenge was: The Past Prompts the Present" and to help us on our way we were given an old (20 years or so) quilting magazine. It was a bit depressing to find I already had the copy which I bought, you guessed it, 20 years ago. How time motors on.

Anyway we were to choose something from the magazine and put a modern spin on it. I found an article explaining how you could use your computer to design quilts (pretty revolutionary at the time, remember we are talking 20 years ago). There were no dedicated quilt design programmes then and the auteur of the article used CorelDraw. You would not believe how cumbersome it all was! She used triangles in her design and I took that on board as well.

Of course we are so lucky nowadays to have the magnificent Electric Quilt Design Programme. I used version 6 (7 is now out!) and started playing with triangles. Instead of the traditional piecing with fabrics I used a mix of fabric and fabric-paper collages and used glueing (with the Xyron Creatopia) to position the fabric-paper triangles in position, although of course I also stitched. But having them glued on first made it all so much easier! Then I went totally besirk with the embellishments as you can see.

In the centre I placed a fabric-paper collaged circle (as I'm so well know for my circle quilts, this was an element I wanted to incorporate) with a butterfly image. That plus the challenge inspired the title: Fluttering through Time.
I handed it over for the exhibition during our Thistle Summer Lunch as you can see above courtesy of Gillian, one of the Thistle Quilters members, who took this photograph. I wrote about it on an earlier blog.All the quilts for the challenge are being exhibited from today till August 22 in the Portobello Library in Edinburgh, just off the Portobello High Street. It's open Mon - Thurs 10am - 8 pm, Friday 10 - 5, Sat. 9 - 5 and Sunday 1 pm - 5pm. John and I paid a visit today and the exhibition looks great (sorry about the reflections but they are behind locked glass doors, which puts my mind at rest about the quilt's security!). After the exhibition ends the quilts will travel to Spain to be shown there by one of the Thistle Quilters' members.