Blogger's Quilt Festival

"On the Broads in May, Stalham"

This wallhanging is my contribution to the Bloggers' Quilt Festival which is being organised by Amy. 
I made this wallhanging, "On the Broads in May, Stalham",  to be a reminder of a lovely day out on a boat in Norfolk and I did share it on this blog in it's early stages back in  February this year.

We sailed from Stalham Staithe and I wanted to capture the lovely bright greens of spring, the flashes of the electric blue kingfishers glimpsed along the banks and the yellow water buttercups. To capture the gentle movement of the water through the reeds I have used sashiko stitching and I machined the quilt together using a decorative stitch reminiscent of a wading bird's footprint.

I added some little butterfly and dragonfly buttons (I would rather have used the diamond and enamel brooch I saw, unpriced, in one of those antique shops where you have to ring the bell to be let in but I imagine it would have cost a great amount of 'fabric-money') and some Swarovski crystal beads and gold stitching to represent the glinting sun on the water.

I am pleased with this quiltlet, it looks the way I imagined it - I was not after a landscape quilt or a picture, but a representation of a time and place.  I suppose the appliqued, bias-tape "reeds" and, of course, the buttons, are the closest aspect of the design that is pictorial.  It will hang on the wall in our holiday 'bach' in Mundesley, Norfolk.

Thank you for visiting, please go over to Amy's site and you'll see where you can find other blogs displaying quilts this week.

Added 26 May 2010:

Some lovely visitors to BQF have left comments or emailed me asking to see some more detail of my wallhanging so here are a few more photographs and thank you loads for your interest and your encouraging remarks, I really appreciate it.

Here you can see the wooden dragonfly button, the sashiko style hand stitiching that was done with a Valdini hand dyed variegated 35wt cotton thread.

This picture shows the Swarovski crystals and the overstitching on the seams which I did on my Silver 9000E machine.

This is the best photo I could get of the handquilting in gold thread along the bias tape "reeds".  I used a Mettler Metallic thread for that.

Finally, the butterfly wooden button and some more of the sashiko style stitching.  I'm going to do a little sashiko tutorial on my Japanese textiles blog soon but there are plenty on the web if you are interested, it's very therapeutic to do.