Glorious Autumn Quilt in detail

I'm returning to the Glorious Autumn quilt I showed you in the previous post to tell you a bit more about how it came to be.

The pattern for the blocks came from a drawing I made quite some years ago of a small detail on a piece of Indian embroidery. It has been hanging around in my studio since then and I even made a small sample of 9 blocks (of 4" each) for which I made templates. It was hand-pieced and took forever to do so I did not pursue the idea of making it into a large quilt.

Then last year I went to an exhibition in Stanraer (as described in a blogpost at the time) and rather than use the main roads I chose to drive there using minor roads through Galloway forest. It was autumn and the colours were simply stunning. I stopped the car many times just to take photographs and somehow capture the beauty of it all. To be honest none of the pictures really did the forest justice but in my head I stored the impressions of that journey.

I knew even when still driving that I was going to make a quilt to commemorate this trip and while thinking about how I wanted to do so I came across my little embroidery sketch again. This time I took it and drew it again, this time in my Electric Quilt 6 computer design program. Rather than using templates I asked it for a foundation piecing schedule and although it was a quite complicated one, it could be done. There are 26 separate pieces in the foundation which is why I left the foundation piecing background in, rather than tearing it away. It makes for a heavy quilt but saved hours of work.

The consequent thickness meant that only machine quilting would work but I simply could not resist adding sparkle with beads (size 11 seed beads). They were sewn on by hand using Silamide beading thread and I did go through all the layers so adding a bit of hand quilting at the same time.

Almost the whole quilt was made during the times we were completely snowed in last winter and although, yes, it did take a lot of time and effort, I loved making it hugely. Simply selecting the fabrics for each block from my collection of batiks was wonderful. I hardly ever repeat a quilt but I am making an exception for this one, really because of my exhibition next year. Look out for Sweet Spring, in production at the moment!