Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Memory quilt

Meet my new quilt, Memory. The idea for this quilt came from a stock photo of computer disks which came with my previous computer (remember those?). All the squares and rectangles immediately screamed "quilt" to me, and I had the idea in the back of my mind for quite a while before doing anything about it. Eventually I unearthed an old disk and took some measurements before constructing my disk block in EQ. I decided to stick to just a few colours to keep it slightly abstract. If I had made all the disks grey, you probably wouldn't have seen them as disks at all, but the red, green and blue ones help the eye a little.
The quilt top came together in a couple of days, but it has been languishing in a pile of fabrics on my table for ages, because I couldn't quite make up my mind about how to quilt it. Eventually I decided on straight lines and got to work. Well, I say s t r a i g h t lines, I should say straightish... I seem to find it very difficult to sew straight lines on big quilts. I mean, the first one goes great, but then the next one goes a bit wobbly, the next one will weer away a bit on it's own, and before you know it, the whole thing is a bit askew. I did about a fourth of the quilt, decided I hated the whole thing, and put it away for a while. A couple of weeks ago I dug it out again and had a look, and decided that I quite liked the quilting anyway - it was either that or unpicking everything...
No, seriously, I did like it, so I continued in the same manner, going a bit more wobbly so that it looked intentional. That's the trick, you know - pretend that's what you intended to happen all along!
I backed it with a favourite IKEA print - I've got almost a whole bolt of it, so you'll probably see this one a lot... So, there you have it: a 40 x 40" wall quilt, named Memory, both because that's what computer disks were, and because in our busy digital world, this way of storing data has become a mere memory.

1 comment :

giddy99 said...

It's awesome! My step-dad still prefers these disks (alarming, isn't it?). Because they work best with his original Digital Camera (even MORE alarming, eh?!?!).