Patchwork & Quilting Course almost complete

Lots of writing up and presentation to do now but wonderful to get my approval today for the course work and for my final assessment piece - the quilt which I have called Aroma Therapy.

The story is that I had to choose a design of my own from early in the course and I had developed several themes around some drawings of a cracked garden pot.  After developing the drawings the pots began to look a bit Asian and made me think they could be used for perfume or spices.

Later this theme was developed further after seeing real and photographed ceramic bottles and pots in lovely shapes and colours.

The plant is Myrtle which is used in many perfumes.

The quilt is made from silk and is a patchwork base of a very simple design which forms a background for the quilting, the applique and the 3D leaves, stems and flowers.

The quilted background is a repeated bottle shape, some of them with the original crack, and curling perfume vapours emerging from the quilted and the appliques bottles and jars.

It is backed with silk and the binding and hanging loops are silk.  The wadding is low loft cotton.  The thread I used was polyester as silk is very strong and needs a comparable strength in the thread.

The quilt is a wall hanging (not a bed quilt) and measures approximately 36" by 54".

I have to assemble the final Course Book and Portfolio to complete this course and then I plan to start my Level 3 Machine Embroidery with School of Stitched Textiles and I am pleased to say the same tutor will still be guiding my work.

Making Silk Stems

I am at the stage of adding the Myrtle plant to my silk quilt.  The Myrtle will be made up of bias cut stems machine quilted to the background then 3D leaves and 3D flowers added individually.

So I have been working on the stems for a couple of days.  They are bias cut from gold coloured silk in strips one inch wide. 

These are folded in half lengthways and ironed wrong sides together then machine stitched with the folded edge lined up with the edge of the presser foot and the raw edge inside. See the photo.

After sewing, the raw edge is trimmed to about 1/8th of an inch. Then it has to be pressed with the sewn edge lined centrally down the strip.  The easiest way to achieve this is to use plastic loop pressing bars.  The green ones in the photo are from Clover and the yellow ones from another supplier.

Not everybody calls them loop pressing bars but the purpose of them is to insert into the fabric tube and twist the fabric into position.  Then iron the plastic bar and the bias strip together with the raw edge underneath and hidden making a nice smooth strip to use however you choose.



 The fabric has to be pushed up the bar then keep ironing the lower flat part a little at a time with the raw edge turned to one side underneath so it doesn't show on the right side.  As you work pull the pressed part of the fabric strip off the bar all neat and ready to use.

 I roll my strips around a cardboard tube to keep until I want to use them.

Here you see I have used 3 strips together which will branch out to form the Myrtle stems across the quilt. The next stage is to machine quilt them in position then think about the placement of the leaves and the flowers..

Making Silk Leaves

At last I am back to working on my silk quilt which is the final assessment piece for my Patchwork & Quilting Level 3 course.  I am aiming to complete this City & Guilds course by Christmas this year as it has been going on far too long.  Already I have signed up for the Level 3 Machine Embroidery course and which I started some years ago before changing over to Patchwork & Quilting so now am keen to get into that course properly.

The silk quilt I am working on has been designed to have trailing stems, leaves and flowers of a Myrtle plant around and over some of the perfume bottles already appliqued on to it. 


Today I am making loads of silk leaves. The method is to use two different coloured silks with both interfacing and Bondaweb in-between.

Iron the silk flat, fuse interfacing to the wrong side of the first colour (I have used black fusible medium weight interfacing which you can see in the photo below applied to light green silk).

Next draw the leaf shapes on to Bondaweb and fuse to the other colour silk (I have used dark green).  Then cut out the leaf shapes which do not need edging due to the fused interfacing and Bondaweb.  Also because they are cut on the bias and bias cut silk does not fray.  This would also apply if you were using cotton.

Peel off the Bondaweb from the back of the individual leaves and place them glue side down on to the interfaced side of the other coloured silk.  Iron in place.

Cut carefully around the shapes which are nice and firm and can be shaped a little bit due to the layers of silk, interfacing and glue.

They are raw edge and will be 3D when attached to the quilt.  I will sew them on along the middle vein and they will lift a little to show the different colour underneath.

Yesterday I tried out a method for making the flowers which will also be 3D.  They are made by hand and will have to be attached last of all.


This pink Myrtle flower is the image I am trying to copy.

I am using circles for the petals which are folded in half and then gathered along the raw edge.

The flower pictured has five petals, a centre and some stamens. Here you see the five petals joined together after gathering tightly.

For the centre I am using a white circle of silk which will be sewn up as a Suffolk Puff.

The method I tried out yesterday was to sew in some stamens, as can be seen in the photo. These were bought from Hobbycraft some time ago and are stiff enough to stand up realistically from the centre.  However the fragile nature of the design will mean they have to be sewn on to the quilt when everything else is finished.

The next step is to make the stems and these will be narrow strips of bias cut silk, sewn into a tube on the machine.  Once I know where I want to place them they will be tacked and then stitched to the quilt by machine.

To be continued ....