Out of Darkness Cometh Light

Some of you will remember reading about this quilt before in my post of 1st December last year. Today I am entering it into the Art Quilts section at the Bloggers' Quilt Festival so I shall tell you a bit more about it.

This quilt was made for a doll quilt swap where the theme was to show where you are from.  I decided to represent the town where I grew up, Wolverhampton.  The sunset behind the factory is based on a view I would see from the bus on my way home from school.  All the fabric was already in my cupboard - I didn't need to buy anything new.  I absolutely love the rusty brown, which is a shot cotton, which together with the black is perfect for a quilt showing an industrial town with lots of old red brick buildings.  The smoke from the chimney is a batik, which has swirls which were just right to show the billowing, and the top strip of the sky is a section from a print cut so that I could use the dark patches as clouds.

All the piecing was done on my Serata treadle machine, and the appliqué was done with my 1927 Singer 99K.

The smoke, sun and feather are all stitched with three lines of stitching around the edge to prevent fraying.  For the sun I used red cotton to make it glow.

For the town's motto (which appears on its coat of arms) I used the Singer 99K to do two lines of straight stitch.  One line didn't stand out enough, so I had to do a second line immediately next to the first. 

To get the flow of the writing, I made a stencil on greaseproof paper.  First I wrote out the words in pencil on a piece of ordinary paper, then laid the greaseproof paper on top, then "stitched" (no thread) along the line of the writing with the 99K using a thick, blunt needle.  This gave a perforated line in the greaseproof paper, which I then laid over the pink material, and then I sewed in the writing with black thread.  The greaseproof paper tears away easily afterwards.  

For the quill in the border I added the appliqué by machine, with a few machine stitched lines for detail, and hand stitched on a piece of cord down the centre and a few little wisps at the base of the feather.  I put the quill at the right, to balance with the chimney and smoke on the left hand side of the picture...

... and the button is on the left hand side of the border to balance with the sun.

All the quilting was done by hand, and the three birds in the sky were stitched at the end, so I could judge exactly where I should place them.

This quilt now belongs to Peggy in Georgia, so I can only tell you from memory how big it is.  So far as I remember, it is roughly 21 inches by 17.

If you are slightly puzzled by the quill and the button in the border, here is an interesting video for you to enjoy, and you will see why I asked for a partner in Georgia.

Welcome to the latest follower, Mireille Solbes - thank you for joining!