Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Triquetra: A making of the quilt

This particular quilt wasn't a huge stretch for me as far as design or materials.  I did use a gold lame, which presents certain difficulties, such as fraying and not taking an iron.  The construction wasn't too hard, but I'll take you through the process, anyway.

First I found a image that I wanted to use and printed it out at a good size.

I traced the image onto Wonder Under.  I do actually buy this stuff by the bolt.

I loosely cut the image and then fused it to black Kona Cotton.
I then cut out all the pieces.  Leaving one whole piece of black that outlined the knot.


This was fused to the lame.  You can work with lame as long as you use a pressing cloth.  I tend to grab one of my kitchen flour sack drying towels.  (a clean one)
I then cut out of the lame the sections that I wanted to be open to the green (which is also a Kona, but I didn't look at the color name when I bought it)  Totally loving it at this point.
Back Shot.

To apply this mess to the green fabric, I sprayed it with a spray glue and pressed it down with my fingers

I then sewed along the edge with a straight stitch in black to applique the whole thing to the green.  It actually worked out that I could do the applique around shapes, so the starting and stopping wasn't too bad.
Once everything was appliqued, I layered as usual, and quilted with spirals. I seriously was getting dizzy doing this, so I would have to stop and take a break occasionally.

I was super smart and planned ahead to print out the Pangur Ban poem in Gaelic, and two English versions, along with the song from the movie and all my label information ahead of time and pieced it into the back of the quilt. I wanted a good remembrance of why I made this quilt at this time.
The binding was all done by machine.  You can find the instructions *here*.  The binding is one piece and gives a faux piping look.  I was pretty pleased at the result.  It did take me three tries to get the seams to line up at the end, though!
After it was all quilted I sprayed the whole thing down with water.  I find that if I do that and let it dry, it gets a bit of "poof" or texture.




The back has a split hanging sleeve.  I was afraid that it might be too big for the corner triangles, but is really nice to hang a quilt with a middle loop and nail, so the split sleeve it is.


1 comment:

Betty said...

Rachel, this piece is wonderful! And while you make it look pretty easy, I suspect it was much more difficult to actually execute. You are pretty fearless in dealing with tempermental fabrics like the lame' and here you aced it again. Just lovely!