What's In A Quilt - 20

I recently completed my crazy quilt project, Crazy for Crazy, and now want to write its history.

The 20th, and last block, is in shocking magenta, with ornamentation in grey.

In the centre is a piece of sari silk, bought in an Oxfam shop in the UK. 

There is a piece of marbled batik, a gift from a friend who went on holiday to the US. 

The coarse weave is linen from Obuse in Japan. 

On the very right a glimpse can be had of a quilter's cotton, with a print of meandering lines. 

To echo those lines I added grey gimp in a meandering way on top of the electric magenta ball room dress fabric at the top of the block. 

Finally there is a piece of craft felt, to the left. On top of that I added a few floral sequins.

I added a short length of simple lace, the grey is rather beige, a bit off colour from the other grey tones. The lace was anchored with Stem Stitch.

A row of Detached Chain Stitch alternated with God's Eye Stitch landed on top of the linen. 

The linen is also host to an arch of Split Ring tatting. I placed a cut crystal bead in the centre of each ring.

Along the edge of the felt I stitched two Buttonhole lines, back to back, each with different number of 'legs'. They were then whipped together with grey pearls.

If you look closely you can also see a length of ric-rac, it is so close in colour it is like camouflage! This pic-rac is a gift from a UK friend. If I remember correctly it was used to tie the gift wrapping, a fat quarter, together over the gift itself. I just love the way quilters create new ways of using fabric and ribbons!

Back to the ric-rac, look closely and you can see it has white dots. To calm down the striking effect of the white against the pink, and to keep to the colour scheme, I placed French Knots in grey on top of each dot.

Adding embroidery onto a piece of fabric is a good way to change the value of a shade, to dull a too vivid fabric, to liven upp a dull one, also to  straighten a curvy pattern, or add movements to a grid. There is so much we can do to 'alter' fabric. I just LOVE the power of surface embroidery.

There is one last piece to mention - the Buttonhole Stitched Ring, which I learned how to do from Elizabeth Healey's book Stitch, Fabric & Thread. The large ring I used to stitch over had the perfect space for one of Auntie's 'gems', a relic from her accessory making days.

As I mentioned in my last What's In A Quilt post, I made this # 20 magenta block at the same time as I made the #19 brown and silver/light blue block. It took me six weeks to complete both, between Feb 10th and March 24th, 2021. I was relieved when I had my full collection of completed blocks and could start assembling them. This took about a month and on 19th of May the quilt was ready to hang on the wall.

All in all Crazy for Crazy took 3 1/2 years to make.

It was nice to write these articles about each block and recollect my memories of what's in a quilt. 

I am so grateful to all who have helped me make this quilt and recall its history.

THANK YOU Sharon Boggon, Elizabeth Healey, my collection of stitch dictionaries, Mum, Grandmother, Honey, Auntie, Jacquie, Sylvia, Kathleen, Sue, Helen, Hilary, Maureen, Maureen, Kaoru, Mrs I, Mrs S, Frances, Catherine... and all my readers.

This has been so much fun I might write a bit about another of my quilts...