Shimmering Blues

This wholecloth quilt design was a result of a class I took at MQX Midwest with Bethanne Nemesh. We were instructed to bring to class a variety of designs we loved and would use those designs as a starting point for our own individual creations in her class.  I cannot say enough good things about Bethanne. Her class was wonderful and I learned so much.  I brought several designs, but the one I focused on for this class was one I had used before in a wallhanging. I expanded on that design to create this design.  It wound up being 42″ square. I did not finish this in the class, but worked on it for about 8 months (off and on) afterwards.  I used a piece of hand dyed cotton sateen as the base material. I transferred the design to this material and then overlaid the entire top with a piece of blue shimmering organza.  I’d never quilted anything like that before, but had seen Jamie Wallen use this on one of his quilts.  I wanted the shimmering effect as these were stylized hummingbirds and I wanted to mimic the birds feathers.

After I was done with the quilting, I decided to use a faced edging, but wanted to add a piece of piping and lace to it too.  I had not done that before and it was extremely hard for me to figure out how to do that by watching a YouTube video.  It’s not perfect, but I am glad I tried it.  The lace edging started out as off white. I wound up painting it 4 times in order to get the right color.  I then added some jewels to the quilt.

A note about judge’s comments at shows.  One comment from show said the lace was a distraction. Another show commented that it was a great asset.  So, I just really do what I think is best for the quilt at that time and I try to always take those types of comments with a shrug – everyone has their own tastes and mine is the one that really matters.

Shimmering-Blues-closeupShimmering-Blues-full2018-09-21 17.01.19

3 responses to “Shimmering Blues

  1. Your quilt is stunning! I, for one, love the lace edging. You’re pretty brave trying something new in this quilt. Congrats on the ribbon too.

  2. Beautiful quilt! You make an excellent point about judging. While certification programs try to make the process objective, there’s really no way to remove personal preferences from artistic evaluation. Besides, I wouldn’t want critique to be reduced to taking measurements anyhow. Opinions will always waver, but it’s yours alone that matters.That said, I do find your quilt to be quite spectatular.

  3. I agree that it is your opinion that matters. Not all think alike. I have seen quilts that won prizes and wonder why? They are not pretty IMO. About like cooking – some like things spicy and others like it bland. Each to his own. In any case I love your quilt – it is beautiful.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s