Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Spring 2012

Hello! Welcome to Poppyprint and my entry to the Bloggers' Quilt Festival. I am so happy to share this quilt with you. It's been over a year in the making, with cutting freezer paper templates, piecing scrappy letters on retreats and finally straight-line quilting slowly, slowly over the past couple of weeks. Binding went on in the last 2 days, so this one is a fresh finish!

Here it is:

'Blackbird Fly' - 86" square, which means the quilt can lie on the bed with the text 

horizontal, or vertical.

Word quilts are usually very evocative and they always impress me. We can express so much with words in cloth.  Blackbird has been one of my favourite songs for over 30 years - I originally learned the song in a youth choir and my love for it was cemented during a 9th grade Beatles obsession. The simple melody and meaningful lyrics get me all misty, no matter if it's sung by the Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, or Chris Colfer of Glee (all three versions are on my iPod playlist).  I wasn't keen on improv piecing so many letters, so I turned to Denyse Schmidt's Proverb quilt templates for this project.

Originally I chose a grouping of fabrics intended for a dresden plate quilt. Then I realized I might be pushing my luck with so much pink AND Dresden plates on a quilt for our bedroom. I'm sure my husband B has a breaking point, no matter how badly he'd like a quilt on our bed (if for no other reason than something to show for this obsession of mine.  Like most quilters, I do give away almost everything I make).  Once I'd switched gears from plates to lyrics, I chose Essex linen in putty as the main background, supplemented by a linen-look French General cotton from Moda.  More yellows, greens and *gasp* even browns were added to offset all the pink and yellow. I wanted the letters and background to blend a little - so that the words wouldn't jump out, but rather require a bit of effort to read.  The top and bottom framing strips are Kona bone.

Instead of cutting plastic templates for each letter as the pattern suggests, I used a freezer paper method which eliminates the need to trace onto fabric (I will share a tutorial soon).  Either way you cut it, piecing all of those letters takes heaps of time. It was a slow and mindful project that I thoroughly enjoyed, especially because it was all pieced on my Singer Featherweight. Some things are just worth the time.

Quilted with 40wt Superior Threads King Tut on top and 40wt Aurifil in the bobbin

Over the course of the year, I pondered different quilting ideas. I considered spacing the lines of lyrics with sashing, as in the original pattern, and handquilting in the musical notes of the song with perle cotton.  I also thought about writing out the entire lyric with free motion quilted script in the sashing.  In the end, you can see that I decided to piece the words close together, as they are intended, instead of separating them with 6" sashing.  The words are so beautiful together, I figured keeping the quilting simple was the best bet, so I went with straight lines about 1" to 1.5" apart. I used the sashing seams as a guide, as well as strips of 3/4" painters tape across the quilt but the lines are still quite organic and definitely not precise.

The back was the perfect place to have bit of fun in a filler strip between hunks of yardage.

Thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoyed seeing "Blackbird Fly" and I encourage you to visit the other blogs participating in the Blogger's Quilt Festival and nominate your favourite quilts. Amy has lots of fun categories for you to keep in mind as you peruse the beautiful quilts!