Spring in the City

Finally I can share this quilt with you as I have retrieved the rozette that came home with it after the quilt had been displayed at the National Quilt Championships in Sandown, back in June. Somehow the rozette got lost on my desk and turned up again when I stopped procrastinating and picked up my Tax Return form. It's sort of ironic as this quilt too has been the subject of much procrastination which is not at all typical for me.

I started making it not too long after our trip to New York in April 2016 and it was of course inspired by that city's skyscrapers and also by the fact that there was so much spring like greenery and blossom to be admired there set off against the grey and red stonework. The fabrics I used were all from the first fabric collection of Uppercase fabrics. The background is pieced and represents the buildings and then I made the flowers separately using the same fabrics and a collection of Hero Arts stamps. They are hand embroidered and embellished. The quilt itself is machine and hand quilted. I finished the quilt in February 2017 (those flowers took forever!) and I thought it was done.

Then one night not long after that I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought that the randomly appliquéd flowers were all wrong and that they should be in line with the buildings. Once you have a thought like that, it doesn't let go even though I thought myself mad. So there was nothing else for it but to remove all the flowers again and lay them out as I had imagined. I was right in that it looked much better but sadly I didn't have enough flowers to complete the layout. I needed at least 50 more (in the end there are more than 100 flowers on this quilt).

Could I make myself produce more flowers? Yes, I could but it took the best part of last year (which to be honest was mostly taken up with settling in a small, sad traumatized dog so making flowers was a perfect way to fill in the spare minutes).

Almost a year exactly after I thought I had finished Spring in the City, I finished it again, this time for good! And the effort has paid off as you can see by the presence of that rozette which represents the Prize for Embellishment at the show. You can see some of the details of that embellishment in the above pictures. Of course I will never know if that might have happened anyway in it's previous incarnation but I do know that I am much happier with it which in the end is all that matters.