From the sewing room

This was finished quite a while back. A big machine quilting project. I've seen lots of 'super-sized' blocks, and I've long admired the bold 'colourfield' style amish quilts, so decided to give this idea a try. Not bad...not brilliant, but not bad. 

Making this was quite an insight into whole-cloth quilting - I'd hoped to make it quicker and easier by using the machine, but it was jolly hard work and I'm not entirely convinced that it was worth it: but that has more to do with my choice of quilting design than anything else, as well as inexperience and the difficulties of quilting large pieces on a domestic machine. Still, I've developed a new fondness for patterned fabric and the associated camouflaging properties!

Here's the back. 

Here is the little white-on-white. 

And this is another go at the 'origami fold-map cushion' design, with hand embroidered label. Quilting design is the fold-map pattern of the flapping bird 'logo' on the tab.

Experiments

So this is an idea I was messing around with and put aside for a while.

It's a cushion - obviously! But I wonder how many people will know where I got inspiration for the quilting from?

Let me give you a clue:

Any guesses? OK, I'll tell you.

That little bit of embroidery there...that's supposed to be a flapping bird origami model. More precisely it is an illustration, rendered in hand embroidery, of a flapping bird origami model.

And the quilting pattern is the 'fold map' of a flapping bird origami model. A 'fold map' is what you will see if you make an origami model, and then 'unfold' it back to a flat piece of paper.

Here is a full size pic of the pink (and original) version:

This was a cushion, but I took it apart as I had a few 'engineering issues' with binding and inserting zips and making it all look nice and neat and professional.

I actually had a particular person in mind when I did this, but felt that it wasn't quite up to snuff. 

It's not an entirely bad idea, so I think it's time to re-visit this and do some more. Plus, apart from the little illustration, it's a machine sewing job: I've been doing a lot of hand-quilting lately and while I love the result - as I have so recently waxed lyrical about - there is no getting away from the fact that it is slow and time consuming. So, the idea of whipping up a pile of cushion covers double-quick definitely has a certain appeal. 

(And that person I'd originally intended to make it for might just find themselves in possession of a nice squooshy cushion before too long)