Final post on "If Only: A Wedding Quilt for Jeremy"

If Only: A Wedding Quilt for Jeremy, 61 x 92", hand-dyed cotton

It's been two and a half months since my last post, where I reported on the decision I'd made about quilting Jeremy's wedding quilt. Since then, I went to the annual quilting retreat for Quilters by Design in the second week of March, just before everything closed in. I was able to show the quilting I'd done, and get thoughts on binding, so when I got home I was ready to finish the quilt. This included ripping out about half the quilting, as I hadn't pinned the layers carefully enough and there was rippling in the bottom half of the quilt.  In the photos below, the left shows a section of the bottom, with rippling, and the right shows a section higher in the quilt, which is smooth, as intended! I think you can see it was worth the work to re-do the quilting.


The next photo shows the back of the quilt. if you click on the photo, you can enlarge it, and you'll be able to see the very simple straight-stitch quilting I did in the ditch, across at each row, and then shorter vertical lines where I could stitch between blocks. From the front, you don't really see the quilting, which is how I wanted it. (The shadowy lines in the back are just the variation in color in the hand-dyed fabric.)

Another detail of the quilt, below. Almost all the small quadrilateral shapes are bright or light colors, but I did include a few black shapes. They needed to be in there too.

The quilt now hangs at the foot of the stairs, close to the front door (off to the left of the photo below).

For the last several years, "Shelter" has hung in that spot. We've now moved it around the corner to the den. The drawing to the left is by Mark Holmes. I like the conversation of the black shapes.

It is good to have both these quilts in places where we will see them every day; "Holiness" is also hung upstairs. It's part of keeping Jeremy with us. It's a comfort to have these and other physical reminders. The small things Jeremy made in wood and metal shop that are still in use. The tiny sapphire earrings that David and I both wear every day in his memory. An item or two of Jeremy's clothing that I wear. And of course, the extended process of making these quilts is itself a way of keeping him present in my life. Other quilts in the series stay put away in a suitcase, the quilts that center on pain, loss, guilt: Loss, Regret, Self-Portrait, Accident, Accident II. I am glad to have exhibited these quilts, but they are too painful to have on view at home.

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Some day I may do a spin-off of the wedding quilt.  Back in February, I had finished the top, and happened to hold it up in front of a window when I was folding it. The piece was beautiful with light coming through. I then pinned it onto a curtain rod, to see how it would look if hung that way.

We have some large windows in the house, and I was tempted to finish it to hang this way. But it wouldn't take long for light to fade and weaken the fabric, so I continued with the original plan to hang it on a wall. But maybe someday I'll make a smaller piece in the same style and wrap it around a frame that could be hung in a window from time to time.

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Finally, for my own use (and yours if you'd like a look back), here's a list of posts about this quilt:

Feb. 17, 2020: Quilting decision made
January 25, 2020: Top completed
August 11, 2019: Editing the composition
May 25, 2019: Back in the studio
Feb. 16, 2019: Steady progress
Feb. 5, 2019: One block at a time
Feb. 4, 2019: A wedding quilt for Jeremy (describes the design process)

Quilting decision made

I've spent a few days doing trials of quilting, both machine and hand stitching, on both felt and 80/20 cotton/poly backing. Thanks much to Beth Berman, who reminded me about the possibility of felt, which I had ruled out because I thought I would end up with hand stitching. (I've used felt once before, where I was machine quilting and wanted it to be as flat as possible.) Beth reassured me that felt was easily workable for hand quilting as well.  

For the trials, I stitched in the ditch, in the horizontal seams that go across the width of the quilt. These rows are 10" apart.  Then I quilted vertical lines where blocks were seamed together. These are usually diagonal seams, and vary from about 4" to 12" apart. I'm a little wary about quilting this far apart (should usually be no more than 4-5" apart), but since I won't be using/washing this quilt (it will be a wall-hanging), this should be OK.  

• The felt definitely kept a very flat look, more so than the batting.
• Both hand-quilting and machine quilting on the felt kept a flat look.
• The hand-quilting was very challenging, not because of the felt, but because there are many areas where multiple seams come together, and it was hard work to get the needle through these areas.

So, my decision is to machine quilt, with felt as the batting. I've ordered 108" wide Dream Cotton for the backing, some additional blue dye to dye it, and some felt for the batting. (For any dyers out there--the Dream Cotton dyes up very well, and doesn't need to be scoured.)

The photo at the top of the post shows a small area with some machine stitching visible (click on image to enlarge).  The photo below shows the larger area where the machine stitching has been completed--it's the area in the bottom right where there are no pins.  (Pinned area is not quilted at all.)  Comparing the quilted to the unquilted area, I am satisfied that the quilting doesn't interfere with the sense I wanted of an expansive, uninterrupted mix of blues. The quilting is not visible, which is what I wanted. Adding the felt gives a weight to the piece that is a good addition.  So, decision made and on the way to implementation!

One final decision remains to be made--whether or not to add a binding that would be a "frame" to the quilt (and if so, what color/s), or to do a faced binding, which is not visible from the front, and leaves the work unframed (like much of modern art). I'll make that decision once the quilting is done.

This is the first time I've done quilting trials on the quilt itself, rather than on a separate small sample. I needed to do it in this case, because the quilting was going to be on such a large scale, and the whole point of the trial was to see if the feeling of expansiveness could be maintained, for which I needed to quilt a large area.  Since I knew I would be taking out all the trial stitching, I basted on a light colored backing, to make it easier to pick out the stitches, and I also used a long stitch when doing the machine stitching (4.5 instead of 3.0). The long stitch worked well, so I think I'll keep that length when I do the actual quilting. 

Jeremy's wedding quilt--the top completed

detail of Jeremy's wedding quilt

I haven't posted for four months, since late September. At that point, I had taken a break from working on Jeremy's wedding quilt to prepare for a printing workshop, and after that, I was prepping hand-sewing projects to take with me on a camping/stitching trip to Utah. After the trip, I followed up on those projects for a while, only coming back to the wedding quilt in mid-December.  Even though I was working steadily on one project or another, I wanted to wait to write a blog post until I could report that the top of the wedding quilt was done. Since it's been a while, here's a link to my first post about the quilt, where I explain why I started the quilt and how I came up with the design.

Below is a photo of how it looked in its "rest period" between August and December. The note I've written in the middle indicates the row in which only a few of the colored bits are actually pieced in; most are just sitting on top of blue fabric, allowing me to play around with placement. All the blocks were still separate at this point--all of them 10.5" high, but of varying widths.

So, starting in mid-December, I worked steadily for a month, doing the final edits on the quilt. Here's an earlier post that explains the editing process. The process was very slow. The final blocks constructed were pieced through careful designing of the placement of each bit of color, no improvisation. Then various blocks in the quilt were subject to surgery, either cutting out bits of color to replace them with blue, or adding in bits of color. The flow of shapes/colors had to look random, without a straight line-up, or a regular arc. Then, when I pieced together the blocks in each row, things shifted a bit and more surgery ensued. I stopped at the point where nothing bothered me significantly. I think I could have gone on fiddling for another 3 months, but each time I changed one piece, it affected others, so I needed to bring it to a close. Below are two photos of the finished top, taken with different cameras at the same time of day. The actual depth of color is somewhere between them, closer to the one on the left, but the one on the right gives you a better view of the variety of blues in the quilt, and how the blue shapes also work in the design. 

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taken with my iPhone

taken with a Canon Powershot

The next photo (and also the close-up shot at the top of the post) gives a more accurate view of the blues. The top is laid flat on the floor so I could trim the edges; the strips of flooring are helpful in lining up a straight edge for a piece this large (62x90").  And using the floor had the useful side effect of my having to give the floor a thorough cleaning first.

I hope this photo also gives a sense of the attraction of the blue fabrics--they call out to be touched. I still have to decide whether or not to quilt this piece. I tried out some hand-quilting early in the process, and didn't like how the thread lines interfered with the smooth surface of the cloth. (I'd show a photo, but can't find the samples right now.) I also did a sample with machine quilting, as this would keep the blue surface flat rather than puffy (as can happen with hand quilting), photo below. To see the difference, you may need to click (or double-click) on the photo to enlarge it.

machine quilted at left, unquilted at right

Again, I prefer the undisturbed surface of the unquilted piece. I think I will try one more handquilted sample, working with a largish section of the actual top, rather than just one block, maybe using a thin, flat batting and a large grid for stitching. If I don't quilt the top, I'll simply face it with a plain fabric backing, and hang it that way.  This is intended as a wall piece, rather than a quilt to use.

I'm also thinking about what to call the quilt. As I've worked on it, I've thought of it as "Jeremy's wedding quilt" or "Confetti-2" (since the design idea came from an earlier quilt that I called Confetti). But I think the quilt needs its own name, and something a little more open-ended than "Jeremy's wedding quilt." Right now, I'm considering "If only."

Editing a composition

I've been working steadily on Jeremy's wedding quilt, and have gotten to a point that I find myself thinking of as the editing phase.  The word "edit" is more often used for text, and I am very familiar with the text-editing process from decades of academic writing. It can be more tedious than the earlier stages of figuring out the main ideas of what one wants to say, the first formulation of those words into some kind of organized prose. But sticking with it, carefully re-considering each word, sentence, paragraph, is crucial to successful writing--writing that someone besides the author can readily understand and that will be convincing. And editing has its own pleasure--crafting and re-crafting the text so that it works to carry the message.

As of August 1, I'd gotten this far on the quilt. Although it's difficult to tell from the photo, the quilt will be 9 rows of blocks, of which I've completed 8--empty row in the middle. There are about 7 blocks in a row.  None of the blocks are sewn to each other yet, so I can still easily move them around.

I started working on the quilt from the top, but then changed to working from the bottom, to give me a bit of a break on the intensity of piecing in the little colored pieces. When I got to this point, with just one more row in the middle to make, I decided stop with new blocks and go back to the top rows, to some areas that I wasn't happy with, because each little bit of "confetti" in that middle row will be decided on in relationship to the bits above and below it. I've marked up the photo below on the left, to show the problematic areas. To get a better idea of what the whole top will look like, I laid some plain blue squares of fabric in the center row on the design wall, and just placed some bits of colored fabric on those squares; nothing in that row is pieced.  The photo on the right below shows the quilt a few days later, after I had ripped out the problematic sections and re-sewn. I'm happy with the changes, though now I see other areas to further edit before I go on to the last un-sewn row. You can click on the photo to enlarge it and see what I've typed in, but in case they're still not readable, I've written them below the photos. (Both photos taken in natural daylight, but different times of the day. The actual depth of blue is about half-way between these two photos.)

• Top-most oval: Take out some colored shapes so they're not in a line
• 4 ovals below that: Replace large blue sections with blue pieced sections (that is, replace one or two large pieces of blue with more like 4-8 pieces)
• 5th row marked off with white lines: This row is still very rough--no sewing yet.

As I did this detailed editing, it occurred to me that technology has come to the aid of editing art compositions as it has to editing written text. Editing text with the assistance of a word processing program is so much easier than a typewriter! For my work in textiles, I don't use the computer very much, just occasionally some preliminary sketching and color work with Photoshop. But I use my digital camera all the time, especially for a piece as large as this one (about 60x90"). The piece is so large that I can't step far enough back in my studio to get a good view of it from a distance, to see how it's all working together. Taking photos--and having them immediately viewable because of the digital technology--is a big help. Another digital tool is to take a photo also in black and white, to check how the range/placement of value is working. Here's the quilt, same as above right, with a black/white version as well:

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More editing to come, before I move on to that last row of piecing.