Quilt of the Week #3

Bound for Dallas

I just love going to quilt shows, drawing inspiration, refilling the creative well, seeing what other creative people have whipped up, buying more thread. Yes, I know fabric is the addictive substance of choice for most people, but some of us are different. So with the Dallas quilt show just days away, here is a preview of what one of my customers has entered in the show. I'm not sure how much of my work will be in the show; that's always a surprise for me.

This quilt is big, too big for the details I feel like sharing to fit all in one photo, so to see the whole thing you'll have to head to Market Hall. My client, David, likes Civil War-era quilts and his usual color palette includes blue and brown. This one is a star medallion featuring an American eagle fabric, which provided the design inspiration for the quilting.

This top has myriad white spaces in which I had planned to quilt all manner of patriotic motifs, but getting them to fit proved difficult. I narrowed them down to various eagles, starbursts, laurel leaves, trumpets, a liberty bell and straight lines -- all proclaiming freedom. Each eagle, modified versions of a Linda Taylor design and one in the book Civil War Women by Barbara Brackman, C&T Publishing, had to be simplified and sometimes redesigned to fit a particular shape around the center star and outside the blue log cabin path surrounding the star. (I have a knack for trying to do something simple but ending up a complex endeavor.) I got the trumpet from a Dover copyright-free book and I drew the bell from photos found on the Internet. I freehanded the laurel leaves.

I opted for background quilting to make the motifs pop like sculpture: radiating lines, tiny arcs and a little stippling here and there. And I added rows of straight lines where dense quilting wasn't needed.

Is anyone else out there a technosaur like me? I can handle hard-to-quilt projects, I can design, I can freehand, I can spell, I can conjugate many verbs, but I can't seem to get the hang of posting photos on this blog. I have more photos to show, but I've run out of computer savvy for the moment. There may be more later. Fingers crossed. See you at the show!