Moon Flowers Quilt

As promised here is another quilt of mine that was revealed at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham this past weekend. It was part of the British Finnish Stash Exchange organized by the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles and the Finnish Patchwork Guild. The idea was that each participating quilter would produce a pack of fabrics from her or his own stash and in exchange receive a similar package from a quilter from the other country.

Above you can see the fabrics I received from a Finnish quilter.

To these we could add fabrics from our own stash (see the ones I used above) and from this combination of fabrics we were to make a quilt 16" wide by 32" long. The theme was up to us. From the submitted quilts each participating Guild selected 30 quilts so that the total show in Birmingham was of 60 quilts in total, 30 from Britain and 30 from Finland. 

I made a background by strip piecing all the fabrics and combining them into long strips sewn together to form the body of the quilt. I machine quilted this background in readiness for whatever I was going to put onto it. 

Finally an idea came as it so often does, when I wasn't looking for it. Instead I was idly doodling on a magazine while chatting. Any paper in front of me is almost guaranteed to be covered in doodles eventually. I seem to be unable to not grab a pen and make marks. The newspapers always end up decorated and when in meetings my notes get embellished too. But this particular evening I suddenly really looked at what I was doing and the thought came into my head that these doodles would make great appliquéd flower motifs.

 

I used one piece of multi-coloured hand dyed fabric to make each individual flower and they were then embellished and added to the quilt as shown. Gold stems seemed appropriate and I also added some hand quilting to the entire piece.  The dark background reminded me of moon light evenings, hence the title of the quilt: Moon Flowers. 

Now that the quilt has been exhibited in Birmingham it will be off on it's travels to Finland and I'm not quite sure when it will return back home. I would love an opportunity to see all 60 quilts together so I'm hoping they will be shown back in this country too.

The Summer Sweet Journal Quilt

Despite the fabulous weather some things did get done and one of those was the journal quilt for July on the theme set by the Sketchbook Challenge. Sadly though the theme for this month was: No Theme. I say sad because I rely on the Sketchbook Challenge to, well, challenge me and without a theme that was a bit of a problem. The organizers are on holiday so I decided to follow suit and dedicate this month's journal quilt to summer.

 

I have just finished and send off a small quilt for the British - Finnish Stash Exchange where we are using fabrics send to us by Finnish quilters (and vice-versa). It's called Moon Flowers and I will show it here when the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham is on at the beginning of August, where it will be on show. On that piece I used flowers made on the pattern of my own doodles. The pattern was still hanging around on my desk and I grabbed it back again and used it for the flower on this piece.

 

The background idea too I've used before. I used a background of calico (muslin if you're in the US), layered it with wadding (batting) and a backing fabric, and appliquéd on many different laces. These were then machine quilted and I painted over the surface with white emulsion paint. I then sprayed this background with a leaf stencil (from Stencilgirl Products). I added the appliquéd flower and embellished it to my heart's content.

The right hand side of the quilt (10" square) still looked a bit empty so I went hunting through my stash and found these vintage butterfly appliqués (hand stitched, no less!). I'm not 100% sure where they came from but they proved to be just what was needed for this journal quilt. They were stitched on by machine and finally I added the vintage quotation from Shakespeare. It's only a partial one as I somehow got glue on part of it and it stuck to itself so I lost some words (the actual text being: The summers flower is to the summer sweet though to itself it only live and die) but I liked what was left even better than what I had originally. It now reads: "to the summer sweet, live and die", which seemed very suitable for butterflies. How I love such happy accidents.

 

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