Kaleidoscope quilt & Serendipity as Well

I love quilting for Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero of Kaleidoscope Collections. I get the quilt and I get to play. Each one of the quilts I’ve machine quilted for her have included metallic thread to enhance the kaleidoscopic feel of the quilt. I brought this quilt home with me from Lancaster in April it lived on my design wall for a little while as I thought about the quilting. I knew I’d use gold metallic but beyond that I needed to sit with it a bit.

I had a left over piece of wool batting that I choose to use which creates a bit of depth and made it necessary to quilt the border a bit more before sending it off to Jeanie. Jeanie stitched a seam around the border of the quilt to protect it while it traveled in the booth that I ended up taking out to give myself a little more space as I quilted. (Surprise Jeanie!) I used two different shades of Superiors gold Metallic and purple Glitter. I used a bit of King Tut and MasterPiece. (If you haven’t noticed I have a bit of a thing for Superior Thread.)

When I quilt the kaleidoscope blocks I focus in on shapes & pathways that I can stitch around the block in one pass that will highlight the symmetry present in the block. Each block is quilted individually and I don’t mark the blocks. When I got to the pink & green I chose to stitch about 1/8th of an inch in gold metallic in the pink and purple glitter in the green.

The deepest shade of pink has a metallic print that inspired the wonky metallic squares in the border. Because I used the wool batting I needed to go back and quilt more in the border so I chose a similar shade of purple that would be present without taking away from the wonky squares.

Once I finished this quilt I started playing with Serendipity As Well again. It gets set aside to work on handouts for Knoxville.

The Serendipity series started with this piece. The one that is finished is on hold until Mary Kerr’s book is close to publication which will be sometime next spring.

Serendipity As Well is a sample of French Silk, silk batting and Superior’s Kimono Silk thread. I’ve spent about 5-6 hours on this piece already and will spend another 5 – 6 hours quilting it. The silk thread is 100 wt, so it’s very fine and allows for some really dense quilting. The silk batting quilts beautifully. When it’s done I’m sending it off to Pokey Bolton for her office…she posted a picture on face book of her office wall and it has a space that is just this size.

I love pebbles. I love seeing how tiny I can make them and how many I can get into a tiny little space. The silk thread because of how fine it is really allows for some dense quilting. Even though there are only a little over 1000 yards on the cones it really goes a long, long way! I’m going to need more colors for the next in the City Quilt series.