We haven’t made it outside for a photo shoot yet, but here are a few more shots of my quilt laid out on the kitchen floor. It’s now permanently installed flopped across the living room couch and has already facilitated a few very cosy naps. Even the cat who hates blankets has been spotted asleep on it.
Over the first few days of the new year I finished up the binding and the last bit of quilting on my indigo and gray snowball quilt, and embroidered my signature. Once the weather is a little nicer I’ll go outside and take some better photos and put together a few notes on the construction and inspiration. For now here’s a portion of it laid out on the kitchen floor. It’s already been warming us on the couch and has graced the guest bed for visiting family. I’m so pleased with it and now have a grand plan to go through all of my decades of stashed fabrics around the house and compile the lot of it into blankets. I didn’t need a new hobby but here we are, and I’ve definitely caught the bug.
I’m finished with the quilting on my quilt, all except for one line around the outside edge which I won’t do until after the binding is on. So close to ultimate coziness!
I was sitting on the couch the other day, stitching away on my quilt, and realised that the quilt and my outfit (two dresses over a long skirt) matched pretty much exactly, right down to the same dyes used and the printing from rusty rings.
I’ve got enough of the quilting done from the centre outward that I feel confident taking it off the frame and doing the rest of the quilting with it across my lap on the couch. Much better for my back and also for my eyes, as the lighting in my sewing room is extremely unworkable. It’s lovely to be able to use it and stitch on it at the same time, and I’ve even taken my first nap under it.
I decided against using multiple colours for the quilting, as the indigo and walnut dyed sashiko thread completely disappear against the quilt fabric. I’ll be doing the whole thing in the navy blue. It’s the only colour in the quilt that I didn’t make myself but I like the high contrast.
Skeeter thought the quilting frame was a pretty good blanket fort.
This past month I’ve been working on my first ever full size quilt, made from cotton muslin fabric I printed and dyed over the past few years while learning about indigo. It’s a snowball style, inspired by a beautiful orange and black quilt that I love made by Sarah Gagnon (link: Pelican Quilts). I like the simple square block with its tiny counterchanged corners. My gray fabrics are printed with leaf tannins and with rusty objects, and dyed with different combinations of tannins (walnut, myrobalan, gallnut) and iron water made by slowly dissolving a cast iron skillet in diluted vinegar. The blues are all of those things overdyed with indigo, plus some of my screenprints overdyed with indigo (some straight and some in combination with red iron oxide).
After weeks of making the squares with the tiny corners, and after soliciting advice from my quilt artist friend Lisa (link: asil) for how to start putting them together, the blocks came together fairly quickly and the final assembly of 4×5 nine-patch blocks took only a day. Here it is all laid out ready to be basted.
And here’s the back, cobbled together from whatever pieces of the same fabric I had left. I got lucky and still had pieces of every major colour from the front: screenprint, printed walnut and maple leaves, rust marks, and pale indigo on top of a piece I had used as a screenprinting dropsheet.
Good news: it already meets the approval of our household’s most discerning seeker of coziness.
Here’s the part that’s going to take forever. I’m quilting this with a fairly large stitch and sashiko thread so it really shows, half a centimetre in from the edge of each large square, in order to really accentuate those counterchanged diamonds at the corners. You’ll notice that I took absolutely no care in making the corners consistent, and I love how janky some of them are. Precision isn’t really all that important to me in quilting, and as long as the 90° corners of the little triangles line up well (most are bang on, and those that aren’t are very close) then I don’t really care how out of whack the other corners are. A good thing, because some of them are extremely out of whack.
I’ve started quilting in the centre with navy blue thread. As it moves outward it’ll shift to a lighter blue dyed with walnut and indigo, then to a paler one dyed just with walnut, for what I hope will be a subtle pixelated sunburst effect.
