It’s Done! Vintage Revisited #6 is Done!

Woo hoo! The sixth and final quilt for Mary Kerr’s Vintage Revisited quilt challenge is finally done. (Drum roll, please…)

Vintage Revisited #6

Ding, dong!
The quilt is done!
Which old quilt?
The final quilt!
Ding, dong,
The final quilt is done!

I think the spokes made all the difference. After a lot of thinking about how to represent the spokes, I took a trip to G Street Fabrics and bought skinny grey ribbon. I zigzagged it into place and that was that.

Did this quilt present challenges? Oh, you bet!

Quilting density was a tiny little demon sitting on my shoulder. First it would whisper, “Leave the shirt unquilted. Quilt in wrinkles or folds and leave the rest.” Then, the shirt looked too puffy and the demon would laugh at me. “If you want the shirt to recede into the background, you have to quilt it down.” Then the hat. The Quilting Density Demon said, “Leave it unquilted; allow it to share the focal point limelight.” Then the hat looked too puffy and unfinished. You can guess the rest.

And then there were the hands. Oh, man, did they give me heartburn! First, I quilted around the hands and added lines to delineate the fingers and nails. I didn’t want to quilt them because I was afraid I’d wind up adding bizarre texture. And so I added only knuckles and creases to the right hand, the one in front. It looked like a glove. Then, I experimented by meandering on the left hand, the one behind the wheel. First, I used monofilament. Yuck. The thread was shiny and the needle left really visible holes. After ripping all of that out, I tried a bigger, less detailed meander with thread that matched the hand fabric. Still yucky. It made the hand look like it had a skin disorder. After ripping out the quilting AGAIN, I added knuckles and creases and steamed out the remaining holes. I don’t love the hands. In fact, I’m going to try to avoid looking at them.

Oh, and I had to add the vintage fabric. I kept the basic hexogonal shape of the original grandma’s flower garden, but I cut them down into irregular sizes, used only green, and fused the pieces down into a tire track. They were still pretty green, and so I stamped them with both original rubber stamps and some commercial leaf stamps using black ink. I did a freeform zigzag around each piece and then pronounced it finished.

The final challenge is the naming of the quilt. I want to incorporate Mary’s name into the title, but I’m not sure how. Puns are fine (Mary-ly we roll along), but I’d like to keep it simple. Since I need to print a label today, I guess I’m on my own to be creative.

Thanks for reading along with this process description. In the next blog entry, I’m going to tackle a new subject: What Quilters Want. Hmm.