March 25: Fixing a Quilt Problem

The weather around here is notoriously fickle in these spring months.  Much of the time we have dramatic skies and beautiful snow-topped mountains, with seasonal cold temperatures that keep us all in our heavy coats.  

But other days we have bright sunny days with warmer temperatures that make the spring blossoms suddenly appear and we hunt up our lighter pants and jackets.  

Last night was one of the former times, with a snowstorm dumping about five inches of snow throughout the evening. This afternoon we are seeing the sun again and the forecast for the week looks pretty good. 

I don't usually mind bad weather since it gives me a good excuse to stay home and work in my studio. When we were on the Big Island last fall I bought a kit for making a wall hanging showing a mother and baby Humpback whales.  The whales were precut using a laser, meaning that you didn't have to cut the shapes out yourself.  The kit also included fabric for a background and a border.  The whale cuts had a glue on them so you just placed them on the background fabric and ironed them down, then added the border, added whatever stitching you wanted, added a binding, and bingo! you're done! 

I had used my own background, a beautiful hand-dyed piece made by a friend and seemed destined to be used as the ocean back drop to the whales' dive down from the surface into the deeper water.  I used the border that came with the kit, put everything together, quilted it, sewed on the binding and hung the finished piece up in our study.  

After a few days, I wasn't liking it.  

The quilting, and probably some bad measuring on my part,  had distorted the piece, making the borders look very wonky on the right side. (Though not as wonky as shown in this photo!)  I also didn't like the border fabric, which was too solid and boring for my taste.

So I cut off the borders and determined that the remaining image should be mounted on a 16x20" canvas which I'd cover with a new background fabric.   The photo below shows how I cut out a piece of brown paper the correct size and imagined the central image centered on it. 

 

Once I had that sizing correct, I played around with different background fabrics.  I liked this lovely fabric but it competed too much with the central image so I chose a variegated blue one instead.    

Then I finished the edges with a  fancy blue and white cord which added a bit of sparkle.  I also found some fused organza in my stash and cut out several circles from it to make bubbles which I stitched near the whales' tails in the upper left corner.  I think they added a lot! 

I stitched the central panel to the blue background and enlisted my friend Lotus's help to stretch and stapled the background fabric to the canvas and add a hanging wire.  Then I hung it back up in the study.  

I'm much happier with the piece now!