Thursday, March 24, 2011

Do You Ever Get a Song Stuck in Your Head?

As a quilter I see many, many personalities represented in quilts. I am fairly narrow in my personal choice for quilts to make, but this job enables me to see everyone elses choices - and the designs, fabrics and styles vary tremendously. Though I may not want to make every one of the many quilts that I get to quilt, I do love seeing what people do, and getting to spend a day or so quilting them.

This quilt was sent to me as a part of my penny quilting sale. The quilt is really very simple, but is nicely pieced. The mitered corners lay flat and square.
This is fairly large - around 75x90. We'd initially discussed quilting meandering stars because that seemed fairly patriotic, but once I got the quilt I felt differently. The elements of the stripes relate to verses of the song America the Beautiful...amber waves of grain, fruited plains, sea to shining sea, etc. There's a row with these waving flags and another with soaring eagles and rushing ocean waves. It seemed more appropriate to quilt it with simple moving lines to represent the wind or the waves or fields of wheat blowing. In the end, I am happy with this decision and I think the client will be too.
I did not do the waving lines through the center flag. This is the quilt's focal and it needs to be undisturbed. I waved through the red stripes of the flag and placed stars on the blue, and simply outlined the Statue of Liberty, which is an awesome fabric for this quilt. Where on earth did she find this??!
So I know my pictures are not great, but here's a look at the many printed fabrics she chose to represent these lyrics. I love those purple mountain majesties and fruited grains. How fun is that.
And there's uncle Sam hats, and some patriotic angels and I'm not sure about the people (2nd row from the outer below), but they just remind me of "We the People" from the constitution!
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

1 comment:

Ivory Spring said...

Margaret, looks like you have been a busy beaver! Your quilting looks exquisite, as always.