This quilt is one on my journey that I have a love-hate relationship with. It was another piece of work that was very early on in my quilting endeavors. After the whole “crusty paint” debacle from making the Love Life quilt, I shifted gears a little bit towards another medium that I was familiar with, but was VERY MUCH outside of traditional quilting techniques- Sharpies.
So this quilt started with me typing out the phrase “Learn from yesterday. Live for Today. Hope for Tomorrow.” on the computer (so in this case I was not actually hand lettering but literally using a font) and then projecting the words onto a piece of fabric that I had taped to the wall.
After I had traced the words onto the fabric I proceeded to go through about 6 black sharpies coloring the words in.
Then, I used Red, Dark orange, Light orange, and yellow sharpies (about 4 of each color) to fill in around the words with some pebbles. Each pebbled was painstakingly colored in using each of the 4 colors to produce a sort of shading effect within each pebble.
When all of the sharpie coloring was completely finished, I cut out the cloud in its entirety and then used fusible wonder under to appliqué it onto a piece of black fabric that I had added an ombre gradient of strips of fabric around the edges as a border.
Then it was time for the quilting! Using a black backing fabric, I quilted around every single one of those tiny little pebbles with red thread. I tried to do some zig zag couching around the edge of the cloud with some Razzle Dazzle Metallic cording and that was a nightmare. But, at this point in time, I had no idea how to do bobbin work and the Longarm machine couching feet didn’t exist yet. I outlined each of the letters with some silver metallic thread. I quilted some sun rays coming out of the cloud and then did my signature Karlee Kurls between them. Finally, I adorned the quilt with hot-fix crystals all over it.
By the time this quilt was finished, I had spent about 150 hours on it. But, because the quilting density around the edge was not consistent (meaning the Karlee Kurls were much denser than the sun rays that further and further apart toward the edge of the quilt) the quilt did not lay flat or hang consistently. At all. But, I had put all the work into it and so I still felt that it would be a good learning experience to top it off with still trying to enter it into a quilt competition. I submitted it to AQS Phoenix Arizona and it actually got into the competition and hung in the show. In order to get that far in the competition you just send 2 photos, one close up detailed shot and one of the whole quilt. I am sure that once they saw the quilt in person and how it hung like a bed skirt they regretted the decision to let it hang in the show! Hahaha… I mean who knows, really?
Then, it came back home and that’s about it. That is why I have a Love/Hate relationship with this quilt- I love it because I learned SO SO SO MUCH about the quilting process. But I hate it in the sense that it was a quilt on my journey that very obviously told me that my journey was NOWHERE near over. I knew I still had artistic mountains to summit, and this quilt was just the first set of switch backs.
-Karlee