Mancuso World Quilt Show Winner
We were delighted to hear from Lynda Jackson, co-ordinator of the World Quilt Show entries from the United Kingdom, that quilters from the United Kingdom were among the winners at the 2019 Mancuso World Quilt Show.
Congratulations to all the award winners.
Carole Wood from Northampton won Best Use of Colour with her amazing quilt "Chrysler Revisited".
Carole shares some of the background to her award winning quilt, her inspiration, design and quilting decisions.
"Chrysler Revisited" was quilted on a Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen.
Carole writes:
My design inspiration was that we had a friend who lived in Manhattan and when staying with him I could see the top of the Chrysler building from my bedroom window and thought that one day I would do a quilt based on it. It took 20 years for that to happen! Hence the name of the quit ‘Chrysler Revisited’.
It is mostly foundation pieced, a technique I love as it is so accurate.
I designed the quilt myself drafting each block separately. Every block is different. I then traced my design onto foundation papers and off I went. I am not especially good with computers but I do like maths and I quite enjoyed the design process.
I bought the purple dot batik background fabric but with the exception of one fat quarter of a magenta batik all the other fabrics came from my stash. The majority were batik but a number were ones I had hand dyed. Sad to say the stash had hardly reduced when I had finished the quilt!
I used a variety of thread as I was more concerned to quilt with the right colour rather than the type of thread. The exception to this was the purple background for which I used Decobob (a fine 80 weight polyester by Wonderfil) as I wanted to densely quilt it but I didn’t want it to be very visible.
I used WonderFil Decobob prewound bobbins for all of the quilting and the top is a mix of Glide 40wt, WonderFil Polyfast, Wonderfil's Fabulux and Splendor rayon. I used a double layer of Hobbs 80/20 wadding.
I quilted it on my Sweet Sixteen and it worked very well. It is very densely quilted with a freehand quilting pattern on every small piece of fabric, I knew that if I did this it would hang nice and flat. Basically I simply enjoyed myself with the quilting, I did a colour at a time so I wasn’t forever changing the thread and decided on the design as I went along, I always have paper and pencil at my side so I just doodled what I would put into the next section and then stitched it. No trials were done. The drawing was the trial. I made sure that there were no two similar designs close together as I wanted them to make people look and keep discovering something different. Hopefully that is what has happened.
In terms of the colours I used an analogous section of the colour wheel from lime green through to purple. Almost all of them were hues as opposed to tints, tones or shades and so the quilt is bright and eye catching, more so than it looks in photographs and so I assume that it caught the judges eye. It also hangs well, partly because of the quantity of quilting which I ensured was of an even density across the quilt.
I have now sold my Sweet Sixteen and changed to an Amara, consequently I didn’t complete a quilt that I would want to enter into a show last year but am now working on one again and am once again enjoying the process.
We hope that you found Carole's insight interesting. We look forward to seeing it back in the UK (with a ribbon!)
