A Finish!

I had a finish this week! Well, it only has maybe 30 min more work, but I want to share! “She Could Not Contain It” will debut at my local guild’s show (Folsom Quilt and Fiber Guild) in early Feb:

She has had an extraordinary journey. She has morphed more times than I can count. She has cause me grief and angst and joy. I have never had a quilt lead ME like this one. There is so much emotion there that I don’t even know yet if I like it.

NOTE: This quilt is done😊 Please no suggestions on how to do it better. This is silk and things you do to cotton do not work on silk.
Also, after I wrote this whole post, I realized I wrote about some of this process before, so some of this may be familiar. I just forgot I wrote it. My bad.

I don’t know if I even can remember all the morphing she’s done, but I’ll try. This is long but entertaining:

1. It started here, with a donation quilt for the Ukraine effort that Pokey Bolton organized. I loved this quilt! I decided to make another version, the version in point 2 below.
2. Inspired by the above quilt, I designed and quilted this much larger version:
3. She looks a little forlorn without some sort of an edge treatment. She was already faced and adding a traditional border to this completed quilt would not have worked well. It never would hang well. BTW, I will be adding some sort of an edge treatment to this quilt and hope to show it once it’s finished.
4. I decided I was going to create an entirely separate quilt that would be larger than the yellow quilt and hang the yellow quilt in front of it. I’ve done that before here. Below is a mock up of what it might look like. I like!
5. The idea was I would quilt up the navy blue silk dupioni with a piano key border and some sort of lovely fill in the central part. This center part would not really show because the yellow quilt would hang over it, attached at the top.
6. The navy silk dupioni is gorgeous, a very deeeeep navy. It is a little “spongy”, meaning although it won’t stretch on the length or crosswise, this bias has a good deal of stretch and kind of scoots around on its own. THAT was a problem.
7. Let’s compound that problem. I chose a very lovely gorgeous tightly woven striped silk for the backing. Don’t. Ever. Put a stripe on the back. It will show the slightest wonkieness.
8. Ah, we’re not done with the problems. Let’s put wool batting (I almost always use wool batting) in the middle. Misty Fuse basted. Wool batting in itself was not the problem, but if you put spongy on top and a tightly woven stripe on the backing, the loft of the wool exaggerates the issues of the fabric choices. Ugh.
9. I triple stitched an inside “border” to separate the central part from the faux border.
10. Okay, started to quilt it. Wow, INSTANT tucks. Slippery silk + lofty wool = tucks. Okay, so maybe my basting needs some reinforcement. I have done this before:
11. I walking foot basted a grid with water soluble thread top and bobbin. Even this was producing tucks. I had to hand baste in areas. That should do it, right? Finally a solid bond of all 3 layers…maybe?
12. The initial idea was to do an all over quilting design in the middle and piano key the border. I’m into grids right now and I decided to grid instead. Grids must be marked.
13. Hah! Howare you going to mark navy blue silk dupioni????? No water soluble worked, not blue, not pink, not white. No pencil worked. I tried a ceramic marker (Sewline). I was loath to try that because they wipe off easily, but it appeared to be my only choice.
14. Ah but it skipped when marking because of the combo of the loft of the wool and the many basting lines. That was not going to work either.
15. I decided to trash the grid and bubble it instead. Bubbles are great in troublesome and puffy areas; they can surround an conquer the puff whereas other designs would create a tuck. Bingo!
16. The piano key border was quite a task. The slippery silk kept on getting pushed against the inside border and creating tucks! Grrr.
17. After a lot of frustration and tucks, I decided I was going to have to control that puff somehow.
    1. I ended up doing a large stipple to corral the puff.
    2. Even with that you can see how much puff was still left to control.
    3. I used my Line Tamer to quilt those lines. There is no better ruler for straight line work . Your ruler foot fits right into the groove and gives a perfectly straight line.
18. The Moment of Truth! I place the yellow quilt atop the blue quilt and even though I allowed for shrinkage, the navy quilt shrunk from the quilting and the yellow quilt goes beyond the inner border of the navy silk. Whadayagonnado? I decide that’s okay, I’ll go with it.
19. But, there’s another problem. When I released the water soluble basting thread, it left a crease in the fabric. ALL OVER! If you are not familiar with silk, it holds a fold. It’s not like cotton where you can steam it out.
20. Yes, of course I tried to steam it out, to no avail. This is silk.
21. So my only choice was to somehow cover it up. I’d been hankering to do some hand work. I decided to hand stitch asterisks or daisies on each bubble to disguise the crease.
22. I love wool thread, so I used Aurifil’s Lana in that screaming yellow. I also used some 12 wt Wonderfil’s Spagetti I had some on hand. And I started to happily stitch away.
23. My original thought was to just use blue and yellow and randomly place them all over the quilt. I had a LOT of time to think as I hand stitched and I got bored with that plan.
24. I decided to add a slight variant and added a purple 12 wt Spagetti to the mix. Fine.
25. Got bored again, and noticed a kind of a waterfall effect coming on. I decided to go with that. The bottom part became kind of a “ground” and the top part has falling bits of yellow, purple and blue.
26. I finally was almost finished; the border was quilted and the handwork in the middle done! I had 2 months off of teaching mid-Nov – early Jan. At this point. I only had “finishing” to do: bind, block and fix little loose ends.
27. About EIGHTY hours later, I am done. What happened?
    1. Squaring up became quite a problem. The quilt did not hang well, it was a lumpy mess! That was unacceptable.
       1. I knew it would not work, but I steamed the heck out of it. It is silk. Silk laughs at steam. “You think you’re going to get me to hang straight with steam?”; she laughed at my efforts and continued to hang like a rumpled towel.
       2. The border was wavy. I decided to put in an invisible running stitch in the floppy areas to cinch it in. I decided to call that a “spanx stitch”, the verb of which is “to spanx”.

1. Okey dokey, now the borders are dead on flat. But that I cinched in the borders and now the center is even more puffy. Duh. How am I going to fix that?
2. I would find a poochy part, then spanx it along the ridge. I did that in many places. It was super tedious as the bubbles are double and triple stitched and I had to run a spanx line by hand right along that ridge. I am glad that I don’t have arthritis. Yet.
3. You know what happened next, the borders waved again. It was Whack-a-Mole!
4. Honestly, I don’t know how I finally resolved it, but I just kept on chasing poochy parts around and spanxing them.
5. I decided the inner border needed more definition. I added a hand stitched daisy stitch in the yellow wool to add some pop. Because I had already pounded a triple stitch in 12 wt thread twice, hand stitching that daisy stitch required a needle puller for almost every single stitch in and out of the quilt. No fun. But worth it.

25. I have it hanging on my wall right now and it’s F L A T! But I do wonder if it will go back to a rumple when it hangs in show. We shall see. I have a few lines that I put in a contrast thread during the Whack-a-Mole stage so that I could keep track of what I was doing. I need to replace those with some navy thread.
26. Once that is done I just need to add a sleeve and label. Surely that will not cause me any problems, right????

It only took 1500 words to give the story of this quilt! And I still don’t know if I even like it.

I’ll be linking up with:

Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday
Finished or Not Friday