Blogger’s Quilt Festival

It must be Spring Market time because Amy is hosting another  on line Quilt Festival.  Allow me to tell you a little about my entry.

I had been thinking about this design for quite a while but I didn’t even want to attempt to put pencil to paper before all my swaps and Christmas gifts were put to bed.  So around the beginning of December 2009, I started the preliminary sketches.

I knew I wanted to include both stitching and piecing as part of the overall design, so I did the initial layout on graph paper.  It took me a couple of days just to finalize the layout, even before attempting the line drawings for the stitched blocks.  I needed to complete the layout first in order to determine the final sizes for the stitcheries.

I researched and studied the characters from public domain designs and it took me about a week to complete the stitchery patterns.  And so the journey began.

I stitched and pieced over the Christmas holidays and gave the flimsy to Nancy (no blog)…my friend and machine quilter extraordinaire…during the first week of January and gave her ‘carte blanche’ to work her magic on it.  Everything that Nancy touches is an original work of art and I left the quilting part in her trusty and capable hands.  I truly believe that the longarm quilting fairy resides at Nancy’s house.  What an incredible job she did!  Every square inch is custom done.

The name I have given to this quilt is Raggedy & Friends.  It is the first quilt that I have designed, stitched and pieced.  I used vintage red buttons, red glass beads and knotted floss as embellishments throughout the quilt.

Thanks for allowing me to share my first full size quilt design.  After designing in the decorative painting industry for almost 25 years, I have found it very difficult to shut down that part of my brain.  I guess I’m happiest when I’m designing and really all that has changed is the medium…fabric in lieu of paint.  I even find that I’m using a very similar color palette to what I use when I paint.

I am still contemplating as to whether I will offer it as a free 12 month BOM (Block –Of-the-Month).

Enjoy the festival and as always…

Happy stitching!

Kaaren ♥