So There, Miss Smith!

When I was in 4th grade I outlined everything in black. My teacher Miss Smith said that was not good art and I couldn’t do that.

It is amazing how things like that stay with us over a lifetime. If she looked at some good designs, art and fabrics today she would see a LOT of black outlines.

Black can make colors pop, define an image and unify many different colors and styles.

I didn’t start out to prove her wrong when I did our Circle Challenge for our Art Quilt group.

I actually started with a different quilt than the one I am sharing with you today.

I finished the other one and put it in a box to send to myself here.

After I had the box sent I had a nagging feeling that it was possible it might not arrive in time and thought I could start another one if it didn’t show up in Saturday’s mail.

It didn’t take me long to realize that was not enough time to make something I could be satisfied with.

On Thursday I pulled out these pieces that were left from a previous quilt. I had added some silk screening to them a year or two ago.

I played with them and came up with a possible arrangement and idea.

The next step was to piece together some of the other leftovers from that project, many of which I had also silk screened on.

I shaded diagonally from dark to light with what I had available the best I could.

Once that was done I arranged the circles and negative circles on the background shading in the opposite direction.

When I was pleased with the arrangement I did a relatively heavy zigzag stitch around each of them.

In this photo you also see the quilting and the backing fabric that have not been trimmed.

The quilting was simply circles that echoed from a central (off center) point.

 

All that was left to do was to finish the edge.

I chose to trim it evenly and stitch around it with a heavy thick zigzag stitch.

This is the finished quilt. I left a “horsetail” at each corner.

My quilt won two ribbons in our challenge so in case you are reading this Miss Smith, you were wrong!

I don’t think anyone from my 4th grade class reads my blog, but it was a combined 3rd and 4th grade classroom and maybe one of the 3rd graders is reading this!

And just in case you are wondering, the other quilt DID arrive in time and also won a ribbon!

I made the quilt in 3 days, but in reality it took 10 years. I started to paint the fabrics 10 years ago and came back to them several times to do my painting and silk screening on them, as well as to use part of them for my quilt “Secret Circles”.