Quilt 4 - 2013 'Time, Space, Patience, and Precision'

 

This quilt was a stepping stone for me. I wanted to find a way of  truly perfect pattern matching and whilst paper piecing was a possibility the very fact of not being able to see whether or not I had got it right until after I had sewn the piece and turned it back over meant it was taking forever with a lot of unpicking. The solution was fused appliqué but with the edges turned over to make it look pieced and at the same time to avoid any risk of scruffy fraying.

 

The quilt took far longer than envisaged and, even using this method, it was not as easy as I had hoped it to be to get the match just right, especially as the same fabric in different colours (and therefore printed at different times) does not behave in the same way even though all the colours are printed on the same grain; I had to be pretty persuasive with the iron! I wanted the centre to stand out but there is no black and white version of this zebra skin imitation fabric so I had to take a pen and trace/invent before filling in the shapes with a black pen on plain white fabric.  The quilting simply goes around all the black edges but does, I think, succeed in accentuating them.

 

Much to my genuine surprise, this quilt won runner up in the appliqué section of the national Spanish annual patchwork competition.

 

Click thumbnails on the right to enlarge.