Oh, the joy of riding on magical swans. Hundreds of them.
That is what princesses do.
Or, so I’ve been told.
This quilt is a combination of hand quilting, machine quilting and embellishment. I did become a little weary of beautiful, magical swans. It was time-consuming but satisfying.
That said, I hand-quilted each and every swan and added extra stuffing to lift them up into the sky. After the hand-quilting I used my trusty regular Singer sewing machine to make big, wide, wavy lines to attach the backing to the hand-quilted front. First I sewed the wavy lines at random and then went back and added a second line to each.
I sewed the binding by regular sewing machine to the top of the quilt and turned it over to the back where I finished it by hand. Grandpa always asks me why I do that. Why I don’t use the sewing machine to finish it all and I have thought about that. I have decided that if my ancestors could make their quilts entirely by hand, after they had grown and processed the cotton or sheared the sheep and made the wool useful . . . I could at least do some of the quilting by hand. In this case the backing and the binding are the same.
My stitches are getting more uniform with practice.
After the binding was complete, I added little satin flowers to the front of the binding. I sewed them by hand about eight inches apart. by pulling the binding into little fold, I was able to give a scalloped look to the edge of the quilt .
When I was a child, people didn’t mix “patterns”. No stripes with dots and no print with another print. I think that being brave enough to mix prints and patterns and colors is one of the more creative and fun elements of today’s sewing and today’s fabric. Today’s fabric is incredibly BOLD !
I fell in love with this fabric which I used for the backing.
It had every color that was found in the swans.
Sometimes I use handmade labels for my quilts
but most of the time I use fold-over, sew-0n tags
which I have ordered and re-ordered from ikaprint on Etsy.
Did I mention the little beads which I used for the swans’ eyes?
“What we love to do we find time to do.”
-John Spalding-
