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Mad silk bowties
Yay, it's finished! Madly bright and a fairly mad amount of work. I love it.
I had the project in mind already and then someone at work threw out all these manila folders
So I cut up the folders carefully, and lots of scrap silk rather less carefully. Being scrap, those bits of silk each have a story or several.
In Fairyland I sewed obsessively and upset my arm, silly me. Eventually I had enough bowties to form the tiny quilt top. Then I spent a few days intermittently changing the arrangement until I was happy. No, this isn't the final positioning, just the best photo.
Then I got to sew them together. All set now!
A gentle pressing to encourage the seam allowances to behave. Then one unpicks the tacking and pulls out the papers, which made a pretty pile.
Then the top gets made into a little quilt. You can't see it but the batting is stitched together from three bits of leftover edges from larger quilts.
All the piecing stitching and quilting stitching is done in silk thread.
The back is built from two bits of glorious silk velvet. The blue is from an old shirt that I loved but never fit well. The cream is from Reverse Garbage.
Buttons are vintage shell (again, yes I love them). Silk velvet is wonderful stuff but so hard to work with. I had to do the facing seam on the cream by hand but did manage to get machining to work for the rest of the back construction. I did learn that one ought not to wet this velvet! silly me for using a soluble marker for the button hole positions. I'll try to remember not to do that again.
Now I have a beautiful thing built almost entirely from (high quality) scrap and memories.
I had the project in mind already and then someone at work threw out all these manila folders
So I cut up the folders carefully, and lots of scrap silk rather less carefully. Being scrap, those bits of silk each have a story or several.
In Fairyland I sewed obsessively and upset my arm, silly me. Eventually I had enough bowties to form the tiny quilt top. Then I spent a few days intermittently changing the arrangement until I was happy. No, this isn't the final positioning, just the best photo.
Then I got to sew them together. All set now!
A gentle pressing to encourage the seam allowances to behave. Then one unpicks the tacking and pulls out the papers, which made a pretty pile.
Then the top gets made into a little quilt. You can't see it but the batting is stitched together from three bits of leftover edges from larger quilts.
All the piecing stitching and quilting stitching is done in silk thread.
The back is built from two bits of glorious silk velvet. The blue is from an old shirt that I loved but never fit well. The cream is from Reverse Garbage.
Buttons are vintage shell (again, yes I love them). Silk velvet is wonderful stuff but so hard to work with. I had to do the facing seam on the cream by hand but did manage to get machining to work for the rest of the back construction. I did learn that one ought not to wet this velvet! silly me for using a soluble marker for the button hole positions. I'll try to remember not to do that again.
Now I have a beautiful thing built almost entirely from (high quality) scrap and memories.