Darling Daughter has been working so hard on her major assessment task for HSC Textiles, due in next month. She hasn't ever done much sewing and has never made a quilt but she has been surrounded by all my quilting and has worked at our local quilt store so she has been inspired to make her own quilt. Darling Daughter is a real water baby and she decided she wanted to make a contemporary underwater applique quilt. She asked me for ideas on how she could accomplish this, I suggested having a look at the fantastic quilts made by Robbie Joy Eklow, they are raw edge fused applique quilts that are made up of fabulous shapes and colours. I found a book which details techniques that Robbie uses in her quilts. We took a trip up to Canberra to Addicted to Fabric and she chose all her fabrics for her quilt and she's only had to add one more aqua fabric. Darling Daughter did a rough drawing of what she wanted and she just started drawing circles with a compass then she freehand cut and stuck her applique design onto a lovely watery background fabric. Next she raided all my brightest threads and started using many and various embroidery stitches on my Bernina 440 Quilters Edition machine to applique most of the shapes. I gave her one quick lesson how to do free motion machine embroidery and she was hooked, no fear at all. Late today she has finished the stitching, trimmed the quilt top down, ready for borders tomorrow. While I was at work this week she made her pieced back from all the applique scraps, she's a very neat and precise piecer. I've been amazed how much she knows from just observing other quilters. Lots to do still, she hopes to have enough time to do some hand embellishing, a bit of free motion machine quilting and bit of tie quilting too. I will take some detailed photos as it progresses.
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