So after having to spend quite a lot of time this week on other projects and the never-ending monster that is Admin, I made up for it yesterday with over seven hours of quilting on the Midnight Deals quilt that you saw in the last post. I set myself the goal of trying to complete the left hand side.
Above and below the text are these sections of scarlet orangey red with charcoal circles. I threaded up with a neon pink and have worked quite closely spaced lines to flatten the background and make it look brighter and pinker than it was before.
In this area of the quilt I don’t need to be adding any new shapes or pattern with the quilting, it’s more just about modifying the colour and managing the fabric so it’s evenly quilted.
In some other areas I switched to a checkerboard fill pattern. I’ve used this on another quilt which will be hung in this exhibition, and while they might not even be hung near each other, I think to have some continuity of mark making across the series will make sense.
This checkerboard is stitched with a black thread. Here I’m just trying to darken that area and make it drop into the background. Everything is quilted very closely so that the lettering which is unquilted appears to pop forward more.
In the photo below you can see I’ve continued with the same linear fill around the poppy seed heads that I used on that orange area. It’s just perfect to flatten the fabric without adding anything that distracts from what’s already there. Here I matched my thread to the fabric colour, again to limit the distraction of the quilting lines.
The colour of the section near the face was a bit greyed out so I used the quilting to make that look richer and pinker. I am stitching this bit by hand with a seed stitch. Spent about three hours on this bit last night and it’s still not done! I think it’s worth it though, this is a focal area of the quilt and the texture from the hand stitching provides a nice foil to the face.
Sometimes it’s hard to photograph the quilting from the front and I thought you might find it fun to see the back, so here it is!
I really like the back of this one! I know it’s a little messy, I never bother with neat knots. I like the back to show a little story of how a maker was here making.
So for now a couple more hours on that seeding and then the face.
Back soon, Laura x
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