Quilt Finish - Positivity Crayons

Positivity Crayons is a quilt I made for a challenge contest.  The challenge was to make a wall hanging using a bale of fat quarters, adding no more than three yards of other fabric.  It was due last Saturday and I finished it one hour before the store closed.  That means that as soon as I finished it, I had to turn it over.  I miss it, but it will be back home in a few weeks.

It measures approximately 40" wide by 55" tall, and it's my own design.

 I had two inspirations:

1. The bale reminded me of crayons.
2. Last year I read Barbara Fredrickson's "Positivity" and had been waiting for the right opportunity to incorporate her ten components of positivity into a quilt.

Hence the name, Positivity Crayons.  I paper pieced the letters using Sam Hunter's book, Quilt Talk.  It was a lot of fun!  I'm definitely going to make more quilts with words.

As I said earlier, Frederickson's research centered on ten components of positivity.  I had sixteen colors in my bale, which would have made the quilt too large, so I winnowed down to twelve fabrics, and added two positivity components of my own (kindness and resilience).

The labels were a dickens.  The cream muslin fabric was too light; the black was too dark.  I settled on this muted grey brown and proceeded to hand embroider the words.  I don't know if you remember, but I started the quilt on a Tuesday which only gave me five days to finish it.  Lucky for me, after embroidering six or seven of the words, I decided they looked lame.  I had to use six strands of embroidery floss to make the words stand out, and they didn't all pull through the fabric evenly.  Plus it was so hard to get the needle threaded with six strands - yuk.  I would not have finished on time if I had embroidered all the labels.

I switched over to writing out the words with an indelible marker.  That all sort of blended in too much, so I surrounded each label with baby rick rack, purchased on an emergency trip to Jo-Ann.  It never occurred to me I might need two packages, and I was sweating it as I started in on these last six crayons.  I wound up with four inches of rick rack leftover.

 

I had a lot of white space in the upper-right and lower-left corners, and I certainly didn't need any more words.  So I appliqued an arrow...

.. and a plus sign.

Most of the quilting was done as a variation on "quilt as you go", referring to the book Quilt As You Go Made Modern.   The difference was that I pieced three big horizontal hunks (upper crayons and arrow; the paper-pieced words; plus sign and lower crayons), then quilted each of them onto batting.  In the original "quilt as you go" technique, you piece the blocks onto batting.  Because of the applique, my design didn't lend itself to that.

But the variation I used still saved me a lot of time and here's why I loved it and will definitely do it again:

1. There was much less bulk to push through my sewing machine armhole or whatever you call it. 
2. Quilting was faster and the stitches were more even.
3. For the times I needed to do a lockstitch, I didn't get a knobby knot like I do when my sandwich includes the backing.
4. It's a great way to use up those odd sizes of batting scraps.
5. The quilt top stayed square after quilting - a first for me! 
6. It was actually fun to quilt, which has always been my least favorite part in the past.

In designing the quilt, I made sure that the width didn't exceed 40" because that worked just right for 42-44" wide backing fabric.

You have to still do some quilting to hold all the layers together, but you don't have to do as much.  Plus, I was in such a good mood from the quilt-as-you-go quilting that I didn't even get cranky on this part.

You can see some of the quilting I did in this close-up view of the backing fabric. Basically, I stitched in the ditch between each crayon; echo quilted around the labels, arrow, and plus sign; and did long horizontal lines above and below the paper-pieced words.

For the label, I made stylized crayons.

After all that quilting last week, this week I need to catch up on the rest of my life.  That at-home quilt retreat sure was fun, though.  I need to do more of them.