"Sonoma Coastline"

Sonoma Coastline

This is a photo of my crazy quilt landscape that got accepted into a special exhibit at International Quilt Festival. I am so totally excited about this! It will show in Long Beach in July, Houston in October, and Chicago in April '10. The special exhibit is called West Coast Wonders, and this is my little portion of the west coast where I live.

Here is a close-up of part of the stitching and embellishment.

Now, however, I have a lot of work to be done. When I originally made this, my teacher, Judith Baker Montano said to put it in a frame, as it is like a picture, and that will protect it from dust, etc. But before I did that, I put this quilt in my local quilt guild's annual show, so I sewed borders and a back onto it, as a traditional quilt. And that's what I need to do for the Long Beach show.

But the problem is that I did a lot of the texturing of the piece with the needle-felting attachment on my sewing machine. That means that some of the fabrics and ribbons are not sewn down, but are merely "punched" into the fabric underneath. Which would be ok if it were under glass, but not if it's going to be handled like a quilt. Some of the fabrics/ribbons could actually be lifted off. So now I have to tack it all down. This entails first of all removing the borders and backing. And now I'm taking similar-colored thread and making little tiny stitches all around the parts of the quilt that aren't already sewn down.

Now don't get me wrong. I like doing hand work--that's why I do crazy quilting in the first place. I could have sat for days and days and done decorative stitches on this quilt. But to go around and make stitches that don't show is really not very much fun. Plus I have a swiftly-looming deadline where I have to get it mailed in. So the best I can do is watch movies while I am doing the hand-sewing, which makes it go a little faster. I have some James Bond for this afternoon.........