What's in a Quilt - The Green Man - Part 7: Painted Quilting

First a correction about the blogpost 'What's in a Quilt - The Green Man - Part 2: Whole Cloth' posted on August 10th, 2023.

I used this picture to illustrate my whole cloth quilt block. Do you remember?

'Yes! I've already seen this block', you may say. You are right, but I made a mistake!  A SILLY  mistake!!!!  Although it technically IS a whole cloth, being worked on a single piece of fabric, it was the wrong one.

Below is the whole cloth quilt block that should have been used to illustrate 'What's in a Quilt - The Green Man - Part 2: Whole Cloth'

As you can see, it is only one piece of fabric, and the whole Green Man's head is quilted on a piece of green sheeting.

I have now updated that blog post with the right photograph.

....................

Now back to today's blog post.  Block #7 is not only a whole cloth quilt, more importantly, it is a sketched and painted quilt as you can see here:

I quite often take the help of paint or crayons to fill in parts of my quilting. Here are a few examples:

Sunbonnet Sue's dress and her Christmas tree are coloured with crayons.

Another Christmas quilt, this one in the style of a stained glass window quilt. It is all paint except the candle which is the foundation fabric untouched!

A fake crazy quilt, all the pieces were drawn with ink pen and then coloured in with children's wax crayons and finally set with a hot iron. The embroidery is real, though.

For NHK's Partnership quilt project 2006, I painted the sailboat on a piece of pink fabric, then appliquéd the rainbow-coloured batik and the palm leaf.

Another vessel, a steamship, is still used for commuting between Stockholm and the islands in the archipelago. The leafy background, the water and the mallard - are all done with paint on a sheet of white fabric. Only the ship's hull is the original white foundation fabric.

The flowers, leaves and garlands on this Block Of the Month quilt are drawn with wax crayons.

So what is the merit of painting? It is the ease of quilting. Appliqué and piecing mean you have seam allowance which leads to bulk. That bulk makes it harder to do the actual quilting, especially even quilting. If you fake it with paint or crayons and hope that from a distance the motif will look like proper appliqué, you can easily quilt through the three layers without having to struggle with any bulk or bumps.

Here is some of the stuff I use:

To be continued...