Regret

REGRET

This quilt (72 x 60") is now finished .  You can retrieve the history of its making from this post.  I am satisfied that the basic graphic design of the quilt captures what I had in mind--the nature of the feeling of regret, which, for me, has to do with a missed connection between two people.

A detail of the quilting from the front (double-click to enlarge; color more accurate above); both thread and fabric were hand-dyed.

And a detail from the back. By comparing the two detail photos, you can see how the short parallel stitches on one side turn into a dash-dot pattern on the other side:

I am not entirely satisfied with how the quilting turned out.  Looking up close is fine, and from a far distance is fine.  But standing a normal viewing distance away, I'm bothered by the puckering that happened, especially in the bottom half of the quilt, a result of the the batting material (flannel) and binding method (pillowcase binding, sewn before the quilting) that I used.  After ironing, the puckering was reduced enough that I'm content to show these photos and to put the quilt in my local guild show next month.  But one of these days, I may come back to this, and do a machine quilted version as well. Before I decided on hand-quilting, I machine stitched a small maquette of the quilt.  Here's a detail of it:

And a view of the whole--I added some complexity to the background by having the lines go in various directions:

Or I could instead do straight (diagonal) lines across the whole quilt.  Or lines going in one direction in the background and another direction on the black figures.

But in the meantime, I've got a few more major quilts in mind, and they get higher priority.