Collage - Painting with Stitches

Quilt #17

Journal Quilt

Collage - Painting with Stitches - front

My reason for making this collage was to see if all these fabrics would play nice together in a sampler quilt.

The inspiration came from Quilting Arts Magazine – Issue 19 – Fall 2005 in an article by Carole Redlich, Painting with pattern stitches.

I cut irregular shapes of each fabric, and “glued” them to stabilizer using 505 Temporary Adhesive Spray, only repeating the blue fabric to help balance the composition. Place one piece in the centre and keep overlapping the others around it.

I threaded my machine with black thread to match my black fabric, (and used the same bobbin thread throughout), chose a decorative stitch and sewed close parallel rows of stitch beginning in an adjacent fabric, stitching across central fabric and into next abutting fabric. The stitching covers all the fabric piece as well as about 1 inch all around on the surrounding fabrics, keeping the rows close together.

Collage - Painting with Stitches - back

Next, I  selected another piece of fabric, a thread to match it and another decorative stitch, change the angle of the stitching and repeat as above until all pieces were covered with stitches.

I then made a quilt sandwich and quilted with simple curvy lines using invisible thread on top and black on the back.

Conclusions:

I could have curved some of the rows instead of all straight lines.

Solid colour thread is more effective than the variegated I used on a couple of the patches.

I liked the finished quilt and decided that my colour selection would work for my sampler quilt.

I would really like to show you my finished sampler, unfortunately only the blocks got  finished and are still sitting in the UFO pile.

Have a great day.

Terry