Quilt Festival: Fall 2010 Edition

Quilt Market is in Houston, and Amy is hosting the Blogger's Quilt Festival again. I debated what quilt to post. I narrowed my choices down to 2 quilts from the past 6 months or so, but remained uncertain. They're such different options, and I learned a lot while making both. In the end, I chose to feature my DQS9 Mini:

 

Sifting through the DQS9 Flickr files, I really admired (and favorited -- not really a word, but I'll work with it) a lot of bird quilts. Quite handily, so did my partner. But I had done very little applique work, and felt totally out of my comfort zone even as I wanted to pursue this new type of quilt.

When I sit at my desk and stare out the window, a tree branch pokes into my line of vision. In late August, there were a couple of red birds (cardinals?) who hung out on that branch, and they served as the immediate inspiration for this quilt.

 

My quilting has grown over the years, from fearful stitching-in-the-ditch to more confident, intentionally showing lines, to free-motion swirls and more. But once I had the background and all the applique in place, I had to figure out how to quilt this little one. How to tell a story or really make an image with quilting. I plunged into the challenge, selecting a bright green thread for the grass. I felt good while sitting at my sewing machine, but felt a little queasy when I was done. Was it overwhelming? Maybe a bit. That's when I added the tiny pink "flower" squares. Ultimately I added tiny seed beads on top of the flowers (one per square) and now love this section of the quilt. But I had some scary moments of "holy shit, did I just ruin this" along the way.

I've started to incorporate labels into the quilt backs I make, and this version is my best yet. The label is the back. The fabric around the white square represents the fabrics I used on the front, and the white bird here was the pattern piece for the pink bird on the front. This mini flew off to Utah in August, where it happily resides (Jeannette tells a great story about it, go check it out!).