Quilt No. 79
September 2011
This quilt was made from a one-piece printed centre panel – hence none of my usual pain-staking bit-by-bit piecing was required. A fully printed quilt ("panel") is commonly known by quilters as a “cheater ” – but these can still be great fun to do. The challenge is to make it your own unique creation. My husband spotted this one in a quilt shop in Elora, and since he liked it so much and he is such a perennial good sport, I bought it to make for him.
In theory, all I had to do was to add the borders and quilt it. On my first attempt, I began by hand quilting it. Meh. It looked like nothing. I ripped out the stitches, but left in all my gold hand stitching around each individual leaf. It looked nice and had taken me just about forever to complete. Next, I tried machine quilting it, but I made a mess and had to rip it out. No matter what I did the quilt looked like it needed a long course of Prozac. It was dull, listless, no life to it at all. I ignored it for a long time as other quilts passed it by on the queue to completion.
One day I rediscovered it in the bottom of a box of UFOs (UnFinished Objects). I suddenly realized what it needed! All the windows were too dark. I cut each one out and replaced the dark brown window fabric with yellow fabric. The houses were now alive and occupied, as though each family had finally returned after a long absence. And, having replaced my semi-ancient sewing machine, I was now able to enhance it with gold and copper metallic threads. Of course none of these show up in the photo. Getting a good photo of a quilt is about as likely as having Nessie pop up in front of your camera lens.
