A couple of years ago I found an applique pattern by Pat Campbell. Pat was a very famous applique artist known for her Jacobean pattern.s I purchased it for my friend Virginia who does lovely hand applique work. When I gave it to her I told her I wanted this to be a joint project – she would do the pattern and then I would quilt it and we would enter it into quilt shows as a collaborative effort. Somewhere I had seen a quilt done with one side having a light background and one having a dark background. We decided to try that out with this quilt top. So the background fabrics were pulled from my stash and then Virginia worked on the applique motifs using fabrics from her stash. She finished it a while ago and then I had to find time to get it into my quilting schedule. The only way I could do that and keep it there was to go ahead and enter it into a show before I had even begun the quilting (show entry forms typically have to be submitted at least a month in advance of the show if not more.
I finished the quilting yesterday evening. This one gave me fits at the beginning – I had a light colored backing fabric and it was showing everything and I had a dark bobbin thread and it was just not pretty. So I spent an entire night – yes I was up all night with a good audiobook – removing all of the first go round of quilting. Then I had some things on my schedule and could not get back to quilting until this week. I’m leaving to go to Florence (SC not Italy) tomorrow for four days for Annual Conference (United Methodist) so I needed to get this finished and to Virginia for binding while I am gone. It needs to get shipped to Columbus, OH for the NQA show by next Saturday.
Just got home from the handover to Virginia. We have a great striped fabric for the binding (it will be done on the bias) and she will also make the hanging sleeve from leftover backing fabric and do a label for us. I switched to a busy backing that has a black background with a Jacobean floral print that worked much better and carries the theme of the quilt to the back.
Well, enough with the words. You want to see the quilt and the quilting, right?? I’ll do pics again when it gets bound.
The border was to also have applique but a miscut and not any additional fabric made us decide to leave it open for quilting. While I love feathers this quilt just didn’t say feathers for the border. I went through my extensive collection of stencils and foudn the perfect one by Pepper Cory. It had a floral motif that mimicked the flowers in the applique. BUT it was too big for the width of our border. I looked online to see if it came in a narrower version. No luck. So I took my stencil – traced it out on copy paper and ran that through by four-in-one copier/printer in reduced mode until I got the perfect width. The I transferred that to the fabric using tracing paper.
We bounced names for the quilt around for a long time and finally settled on Split Personality.
Thread – I used Bottom Line prewounds in the bobbin – light grey and dark grey. Top threads were a stew….Glide, So Fine, a King Tut variegated in the border, and trilobal poly embroidery thread from Long Creek Mills. Lots of thread color changes as I worked on the applique motifs.
