Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Paisley Star Mandala


This is a quilt that I made in 1982. I had this wonderful paisley fabric from Gutcheon Patchworks. Marti Michell had come out with a set of templates that had various different sizes of a shape on one template. For this quilt I used her diamond, half square triangle and square. You could see through them so it was easy to place them on the same part of the fabric for each paisley. Each shape had the same sizes so I was able to cut all the pieces to fit together correctly. The templates made it so easy to build this stunning quilt. This is a BRC quilt.


I hand quilted this quilt. It is 36 inches square. I am including this close up so you can see how close the quilting is. You will probably have to click on it to enlarge it to see this. I quilted around the paisleys but in the other areas of the quilt the quilting is about 1/8" inch apart. After spending so much time doing this amount of quilting I realized it didn't even show on the patterned fabric. It did create the texture I wanted though.

I mounted this quilt on a wood stretcher frame made to fit the quilt. I did no quilting in the border as I used a unique way of attaching this.
I first stapled the back of the quilt to the stretcher frame. I placed an extra layer of thick batting in the border area and then stretched the front of the border and stapled it the the frame. It was a lot of work but created a very special effect.

The puzzle is the quilt you have just seen.
Click to Mix and Solve

4 comments:

Jean said...

Beautiful, I love paisleys and kaleidescope quilts.

Eva said...

I wouldn't be surprised if it had won an award.

wen Redmond said...

AH yes I remember those days, followed by the Kaleidoscope phrase. I did my first in the late 70's and batiked all the fabric- should've kept it up- now it's all that and a bag of chips

Norma Schlager said...

It a lovely quilt, such precision!