A Silk Quilt Challenge

Efforts on my silk quilt are all about tacking at present.  I have spent about four hours tacking the top layer of silk tiles to the wadding and the backing.

Starting from the centre I have tacked a grid with lines about four inches apart.  It doesn't show up very well in these photographs unfortunately.

Once the grid is done then it's important to tack all around the edges.  Silk does fray easily and I don't want to lose too much of it from fraying while I am quilting and sewing on the appliques so the tacking phase is really important although laborious and time consuming.




Previously over several days I have been tacking silk around the edges of the wadding and Bondaweb shapes.  I bonded the silk to the wadding then cut out the bottle shapes with a generous 1/4" seam allowance.


The seam allowance is finger pressed over the edge of the wadding with little folds where the shape curves outwards (convex) and snips into the seam allowance, but not too close to the fold, where the shape curves inwards (concave). Then pressed around the edges with a cool iron.

Having done this preparation the next step is to decide where the bottle shapes will be placed on the quilt so that I can decide on where and how to do the background quilting.

For my quilting designs I am going to sketch in an outline bottle shape with free machine embroidery.  This practice one in the photo has a crack down the side as my original designs many months ago were based on a cracked garden pot.  Not sure yet whether to include this in the quilted shapes or not.

The other quilting pattern will be of an imaginary curving twisting vapour rising from the top of the coloured applique bottles.

Once the background quilting is done I will start to add the bottle shapes using needle-turn hand applique.  After that I will be making stems, leaves and flowers for the winding Myrtle plant which will be partly machine applique and partly hand applique.  To be continued ...