Paul’s quilt – Blogger’s Quilt Festival

I am entering Paul’s quilt in a competition: Blogger’s Quilt Festival.  If you would enjoy seeing some real show stopping quilts, head over there and scroll past the prizes.

The Quilt Stats:

• Quilt Measurements : 84×84
• Special Techniques used, if any: improvisational piecing
• Quilted by… Roberta Brooks
• Best category: Scrap quilt, bed quilt

Now for a brief history of Paul’s quilt:

Paul is my younger son.  I had already made my older son a quilt for his bed, and I wanted to make one for Paul.  I asked him for input and he mainly had two stipulations: red and black.  He has been going through a black period with his clothes the past few years (not goth, more jazz musician style). Many of the t-shirt panels and much of the grey and black denim are his own outgrown clothes.

It is fun to work for me to work on a “sampler” quilt since I can use so many different ideas and improvise all the way to the end.  I tried to incorporate a lot of different elements that all related back to Paul.  He has only really worn black jeans for the past few years, so those crazy denim blocks were my first ideas.  For a time I thought I might have two or three quilts: one denim, one t-shirt and one pieced blocks, but the color palette was enough to unite the different blocks.

I also love the quilting motif I used – circles with straight lines.  As usual, I did a combination of hand quilting and machine quilt.  I did machine quilt in the ditch on the horizontal lines between rows for extra stability.  I used several different sized plates as templates and then used a white pencil to draw the circles on for a guide for my hand quilting.  I love the landscape effect that evolves from these shapes.  I decided to leave my knots exposed ala Alabama Studio Sewing.  It is difficult to see, but I used embroidery floss, in red, black and grey as well as  metallic thread to create the hand stitching.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t photograph well, but there are multiple sizes of wales of corduroy in the black jean blocks.  It adds a lot of texture. In the upper center, the ripped area is a pocket that I pulled up partially.  I really love dimensional sections like this.

In the upper right corner is a block I call the Christmas cow, a partially completed block that I had from my grandmother.  I try to add a little fabric from the materials I was given when she passed to all my quilts.  The black pin polka dot fabric in the frame is from my Aunt Lou.  I love to add these layers of meaning to my quilts.  It evokes the generational history we all have from the fiber arts.

I love the way the back turned out.  The bottom is musical instruments, then black on black music notes, then dragons, then lobsters on newspaper, finally music on white.  All in all, I think it is one of my best quilts and I am really glad that Paul ended up with it.