This was a tricky quilt which I was commissioned to do, but not paid much for. A good friends mother wanted an Asian-like quilt with lots of red. She also liked metalic-gold and silver, and some other things, soooooooooooooooo I struggled with some ideas, and tried to gather some materials.
I got online and shopped for something not too expensive, Asian-looking, and red and eventually found a nice red for a background. I also saw a nice looking quilt in a book of fan quilts, which had different varieties of fans that I really liked. The problem is that I had to cut out patterns, trace and cut out materials for the fans, and then attach them to a light background using an applique-type method. I don’t particularly like to applique, but I love to quilt! The fans also required rounded edges to be attached good face to good face which to me is really difficult to do. Quilting and rounded edges don’t gel well. The fans were annoying to make, but turned out pretty nice, but not perfect.
That particular quilt was not a very large one so I had to go around the border with large picture-frame squares about 12″X 12″ with a nice color inside and varied beige frames. I also put in an inner and outer border around these sections using very colorful, nice 2 1/2″ strips of varied lengths around this and the inner fan quilt. So now I had a queen sized quilt which is what the person wanted. It turned out much cooler than I anticipated.
The real problem came in how this quilt was put together. I tried a new technique of doing the quilt face, batting and backing in long sections which made it doable on a regular sewing machine rather than renting the use of a long arm machine down town to quilt the sandwiches together. It seemed like it would be easier this way, but I had to do a lot of hand stitching to connect the backing. Here’s how it went:
Take one 12 1/2″ x 52″section of the red background full length. Add a similar size of batting and backing and quilt the long print strips in long straight rows spaced about 2 inches apart. I made 3 of these sections. Two more long section strips were done with five 4 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ sections of the red background with one of the four fans in between the red sections, thus giving us 8 fans (each different, and pretty nice looking in tones of reds, blues, purples, and greens). These were all quilted, then you roll back the batting and backing in order to connect the front quilt sections together. That worked okay, but it surely wasn’t as easy as I had wanted. The difficult part was to now attached the strips on the backing side BY HAND, using a slip-stitch seam which I had to look up on the internet to learn how this is done. It wasn’t too hard, but there was plenty of it which took forever it seemed. It was tedious doing this. One section puffed out a little and wouldn’t lay flat, so I guess I did something fishy in my spacing there, but I left it that way.
It was a little trickier attaching a border to this type of quilt which I hadn’t anticipated, but I got it done, along with a complimentary binding of a deep blue w/ Asian print.
Well, a seemingly easy quilt turned into quite a project, but I did add on to a quilt design that was quite a bit smaller. I learned a couple of things here:
1. If you are going to take a commission to do a quilt, it would be better to do something you like if possible. I didn’t enjoy doing this one as much, it was out of my style and taste.
2. Although it seemed like it might be an easier quilt to make it turned out not to be, even the part which was the original design, and it was a bit annoying to pull together. I seem to run into this more difficult business a lot.
3. I did learn some new techniques although I may not use them again.
4. I learned to make fans, and that they are not necessarily simple to do. And I learned a bit about how to use patterns, which I thought was a bit more fuss than I like.
5. I found that I don’t always have to go to a big free-arm quilting machine to do my quilting, although I now think I prefer that.
That’s it for now. Here are some more pictures.
fatquarterly 