The Festival of Quilts is not till August.
Apart from the binding I have (whisper it . . . ) finished one of my entries!
Granted it's not huge - 48" x 33" - and it is simply pieced, but it has been thoroughly machine quilted. And when I say thoroughly I mean a half-inch grid - all over. Except for the large (24") circle which was mono-printed on using fabric paint after the piecing but before the quilting, and then machine quilted. The mono-printing was a nerve-wracking process - fabric paint tends to be a permanent process so it had to be right first time.
The fabric is a variety of hand-dyed and printed fabrics, all in pale(ish) blues, greys, browns, teals - in other words colours of the sea. I've been making this fabric over the past year, and the latest lot is double-sided (ie one colour on the front and another on the back), wax and flour resist, mainly with distressed circles and other textural marks. It was this fabric that was responsible for the quilt. It spoke to me whilst I was washing it out (a long process - as anyone who has done wax resist with thickened Procion dye will tell you it becomes addictive and you just keep making more) and told me to cut it into squares and rectangles and make this quilt!
So no photos of the fabric, because I've cut most of it up. I'll take some quilt photos soon and post them.
Skin of the teeth productions is alive and well, however, with the first 4 journal quilts of 2013 posted at midnight on 30th April (the deadline!). The final stitches had gone in less than an hour before.
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| January - Wheal Grenville |
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| February - Wheal Frances |
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| March -Wheal Coates - the iconic tin-mine on the cliffs above Chapel Porth beach |
This year the format is 8" x 12" landscape, and we have to have a theme. My theme is By the Sea, and these 4 quilts from left over tin-mine designs qualify in that they are all by the sea (and anyway, nothing is very far from the sea in west Cornwall).
I have discovered a great way of binding these little quilts, which is Not Cheating. It involves using pre-fused fabric which you stitch at the front as usual, and then simply press in place on the back. Wouldn't be sturdy enough for a bed quilt, but perfectly fine for this application. And I expect everyone else has been doing this for ages, but I was always a bit slow on the uptake!
