doodle quilt – Slaney Quilting Studio

Have you seen black whole cloth quilts quilted with coloured thread? I saw them first time 4-5 years ago somewhere online. I was completely captured with that image. Quilting on white fabric is beautiful but on black is something else.

So I bought this pack of rayon threads that long ago but I wasn’t confident enough to make a quilt with them. So they waited patiently in a box.

Now finally I have decided to make a black quilt but a bit more colours in it.

I cut 1.5″ square of various fabrics and made some strips. Initially there were seven of them, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red and pink. And it looked like needed more strips. So I added purple/blue, blue/green, yellow/orange and orange/red. The length are varied just because I didn’t have enough of each fabric in each colour.

They were set in the black fabric. At that time I made one orange strip out from two and removed the pink strip because it was getting a bit crowded and I wanted a long strip on warm colour side. And then I thought it might need less colour but I carried on…

Quilting had to be good, very good because every stitch will show up! I went slowly as I can. I think it went fine.

I marked dividing lines with a white chaco liner from Clover which didn’t stay very long before dusted off while handling it. Each section was quilted with different coloured threads. All the empty space were nicely scrunched up which needed to be even out at next stage.

Those space were quilted with black thread with hope of adding some texture. I know black is difficult to photograph. If I want that black to be black enough I can’t really show quilting. If quilting is visible, it is not quite black. And those fluffs! I spent a good while removing them with a lint roller but…. Some fibre are from wadding and it is stitched down while I was quilting. Would they ever come out?

I didn’t want to quilt on the coloured fabric parts but after quilting everywhere else, those parts looked a bit too scrunched. However steaming made them flat enough and I didn’t think they needed to be quilted. Some parts are still slightly wonky but that’s fine with me.