A Tangled Web

I have been fiendishly working away on a large quilt that was nearing the completion of the hand quilting stage. I try and not let myself  be overcome by workaholism but when the end is in sight all I want to do is get on with it and get it done. Which it now is! Still a lot more to do such as thinking about beads and binding but the bulk of the work is done. I'm clearing the decks for another project about which you will hear more in the future. During this process I also had to free up time to make my monthly 10" square journal quilt on the theme set by the Sketchbook Challenge.

And once more that theme was uncannily like what I wanted to do anyway. The theme is Animal Companions and as soon as I read it on the site I knew that I wanted to return to a photograph I took back in September (see my blog post here) of a spiderweb. I wrote in my blog post that we must be accompanied here on this earth by many, many spiders so it seemed to fit the theme perfectly. I looked again at some of the photographs I took at that time such as the one above.

And I also read more about how spiders weave their webs in a dinky little vintage book called The Natural History of The Year for Young People, by J. Arthur Thomson, published in 1896 in which the above illustration can be found. This is my handbook for any natural phenomena that are a mystery to me. He describes it all in great detail and in easy to understand language even for those of us who are no longer young. The illustrations too are priceless. I bought this book very cheaply to use as collage material but it's simply too precious for that.

I started the quilt by making the strip pieced background which was then machine quilted. I added the web by hand using silver thread and couching and then added the silver beads to represent raindrops. I knew that somewhere I had a spider button and after a bit of a search I found it and it turned out to be the exact same size as I had made the centre of my spiderweb. It was just meant to be!

The final touch was adding the vintage text which reads: "O what a tangled web we weave".