12 By the Dozen

Red

   This must be the first time I've finished a quilt a month and a half before the deadline! I've 'cheated' by using a quilt that I made about ten years ago, but which had a major problem with the last step, just before I was going to enter it in a European Quilt Association exhibition:  the only time I have ever wanted to enter anything. I was so dispirited at the time that I abandoned it, despite having spent over 40 hours on the seed stitch quilting.The theme for the exhibition was colour and each member country of the EQA was allotted a different one, the one for France being red. I played around with a stamp pad and used the resulting motif for my quilt. I used  quilting cottons and a transparent fabric for the motif of overlapping squares, outlining them with couched gold threads. The foil for the central squares was the last thing that was added, and that is where everything went wrong, despite it having worked perfectly on a sample piece. I had used bondaweb to attach the squares, but when I added the central gold foil squares to each motif the foil attached itself to more of the motif than intended as the glue must have seeped through the transparent fabric. It looked terrible. I have had to take off all the appliquéd motifs, and remake them, this time adding the gold foil squares to the centre before I applied the bondaweb to the transparent squares,then applying them to the quilt. I'm pleased to have had this opportunity to finish it, as I doubt that I would have got round to it without the deadline of this challenge.

   The following photos show the original sample that worked and my sketchbook try outs