Carnival

 

art quilt, 15" x 25.5"

 

Artist's Statement

Carnival hangs flat and square at 15 x 25-1/2 inches and is made with Artistic Fabric, my own hand-painted 200 count cotton fabrics, it is fade resistant.

Of this series, I think this is my favorite quilt - although I like the fibers and couching on Couching Fun more than any element in the series. I have always told students when they look at a quilt and say to themselves, "I really like that (or dislike that)," to then consider what about the quilt makes them feel this way. Is it color, the pattern, the fabric, etc.? It is often a very revealing exercise. In the case of this quilt, I still can't say why I like this one better than the other "snow day" quilts. I know I like the various individual elements, but when I take more than one in at a time, I just shake my head and think, "No way." Perhaps I just had more fun making this one, which is why I called it Carnival.

Below...

I programmed a double-sided 9mm wide blanket stitch into my sewing machine (the one built in to the machine doesn't really look as if it was done by hand - my own version does) and sewed it in all the seams. All of the raw edges are rolled under but I like using black in various ways with lots of other colors and thought this would be a great way to accent the seams. Each area (seperate piece) is quilted and embellished in its own way but the black blanket stitch visually ties them all together.

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When I couched all of the decorative yarns on the dark green piece, I knew the bottom ends I could hide in the seam and binding. The top ends I might normally have pulled through the quilt top (with a tapestry needle) and buried them in the batting. I don't like the look of doing a small satin stitch over the ends... doing so calls too much attention to the ends. I prefer making them disappear in to the quilt or seams. In this case, I secured the top ends with a knot of quilting thread to hold them down tighly, then allowed tails of the yarns to fall down over themselves. To give them weight so each tail hangs straight down, I added beads as you see below.

Here you can also see some of the cording (with pearl cotton) on the upper red piece and how I used a built-in stitch to quilt the purple piece.

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This photo shows how I played around with various ways to quilt each piece. The orange fabric I quilted in a spiral following the shape of the piece. (I really like the one lonely bead on it.) The light green fabric I quilted with straight parralle lines of red and blue, each angling a different way and giving an interesting raised relief. I also sewed lines in a zig-zag pattern between these areas and used the bungle beads to reflect these straight lines. The yellow fabric was quilted with a freemotion meandering zig-zag stitch, around the twisted chenile yarns. The darker red fabric was bobbin quilted... I hand wound yarn around a bobbin and stippled quilted in this area on the back. (I sewed a straight stitch in the seams around this fabric as an outline guide on the back before doing the bobbin-work.) In some cases you see I have used contrasting thread to quilt with to make the quilting more obvious and to give the solid-like fabrics a pattern.

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Here you see a close-up of the lower left corner. I dove into my scrap bin for most of the fabric used in the "snow day" quilts. This peachy-colored fabric was rather boring to me so I jazzed it up with stripes following the curve of the seam. My stripes are strands of yellow and purple pearl cotton, spaced evenly apart, sewed over with stitch 15 of the Pfaff 7570 (two double stitches for each zig and zag) using green thread. (See "Embellishment" from the main menu for illustrated cording instructions.) The beginning and ends of the threads were buried in the binding seam.

Since I am looking at this picture as I write, I can't help but think about mitering the binding at corners. It is the easiest way to turn a corner and I just don't understand why so many experienced quilters don't do this. I prefer to see the beginning and ends of the binding mitered as well so you can't tell where the all binding strips were mitered together (yes miter them too) and where the quilter started and stopped when attaching the binding to the quilt... okay, so I am a mitered-binding-snob, what can I say.

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In the long yellow area I wanted to use a large two colored chenille yarn going down the piece in a curved zig-zag fashion. The thing was, I could not find large chenille yarn in anything but solid colors in the large stash of decorative yarns I have collected. I have oddles of small multi-colored chenille yarns. I didn't feel like painting any of the large white chenille I have, not just for this "snow day" quilt. So, I grabbed two different solid colored chenille yarns, and starting at the top, I tacked the ends down together (to be hidden in the seam and binding) and sewed a few stitches, crossed the yarns over one another in front of the needle, sewed a few more stitches, crossed them again, and sewed like this back and forth across the yellow fabric in the pattern I wanted, all the way down. When I got to where I decided to end, I broke my own personal "rule" and secured the ends with a short satin stitch - which I must say is not very noticeable with such a fuzzy yarn (I thought it might be too thick to try to pull through and hide in the batting). Even in this close-up photo, you can not tell I sewed and crossed two different solid colored yarns to make the twist effect. Oh and just for fun, I added another lonely bead, somewhat hidden this time, to surprise a viewer of this quilt.