Hey, I got another quilt done! Hooray! Again, it's another small wallhanging, about 21" x 27". I'm calling it Little Red Boat in the Big Black Sea, for reasons that will soon become apparent.
The fabric is all cotton that I dyed. I finished the top in late spring of 2005, and was one of, if not the last, quilting things I did before The Great Hiatus. It was the first time I did anything in this style before (most of my stuff before this was largely geometric using bright, bright colors, typically orange and blue). Anyway, if I get back to piecing together quilts, this is more along the lines of things I'd like to do.
Here's a detail shot, and one of the back:
The back is kind of messy, and there's a fold in some of the backing fabric where my basting went wrong, but I tacked it down and I think it's okay now. Besides, it's a wallhanging, so no big deal.
The swirls in the sky are stitched using 4 different colors of thread, including a metallic silver (which really sucked to use, so there's only a few swirls of it). After it was quilted and bound, I went ahead and added the beads in the centers of the swirls to make the stars. Sewing on the beads was kind of a pain to do, too.
I learned a lot doing this quilt, which is cool. Specifically, I'm not too crazy about how tripped out the sky looks. In retrospect, I would have used black and dark gray thread instead of the lighter grays and metallic I used. However, I didn't have any dark gray on hand, and I'm trying to use up the supplies I have before buying new ones. I actually dyed the same gradation of grays in silk, with the thought of maybe replicating this quilt in silk at some point.
Since I've finished 2 wallhangings, and have limited space in which to hang things in my house, I've moved some stuff around. So I took a few pictures of some of the older quilts I completed that I had hanging up. The first is a paper-pieced version of the county courthouse where I live. Commercial fabrics, but the pattern is my own.
I made that in February (I think) of 2003. The other one was made in March or April, I think, of 2005. This one is pretty typical of a lot of the stuff I did, using the hand-dyes and going heavily on basic geometry, except it uses machine embroidery (the butterflies) and some yarn embellishment, which was kind of a new thing for me.
You'll notice the blue and orange theme. I think for about 2 straight years, everything I did featured bright blue and orange together. It was madness!
