Sunday 18 August 2013

A Fine Line

machine quilting detail of Stephanie Pettengell's 3D cube

I got to know Stephanie at our Machine Quilting Retreat last January. It was a great group of girls. We all had a wonderful time, laughed a lot and learned so much from each other. People from the group have been keeping up with each other ever since. Stephanie rang a few months ago looking for some threads that would show up against black. She went for Kimono Silk in the end. I was thrilled to get to see the completed projects at the Festival of Quilts last week! 

Stephanie and Martha at the Festival of Quilts 2013

Stephanie belongs to a Textile group called New Horizons and they were invited to exhibit in their very own gallery at this years Festival of Quilts.

Stephanie with her cube in front of her Profiles quilt

The combination of the fine line and the vivid gold colour of the silk was so effective in this project. The New Horizon group members created cubes to give 3D interest to the gallery for visitors. Stephanie created six different circular designs free-motion quilting intricate feathers sitting at the sewing machine.The Kimono Silk threads were just perfect!

exquisite quilting - one face of Stephanie's cube
However, I think that Stephanie's Profile wall hanging generated the most interest! I'll let Stephanie tell you the story in her own words:

"As a member of The New Horizons Textile Group, with the theme of ‘Now We Are Twenty’ I designed the wallhanging ‘Profiles’ for our gallery at the Festival of Quilts 2013. My design was based on the fact that we often have to write a ‘profile’ of ourselves when we show our work. Looking further into the visible profile of a person I wondered how each of us came to think of a theme for our next exhibiting work and how our brains developed our ideas. I wanted the finished piece to make people look more than once,  as I love quilts where you look once and then look again and find more to see. To do this, as well as quilting the discharged visible ‘heads’ I also quilted ‘heads’ in the background among the whirling feathers. Hopefully this invites viewers to step in to see more of the design as the background is textural at first but the more you look the more detail you can see. To achieve this you need a fine thread with a fine needle, I used black kimono silk thread with a small needle to stitch on the black fabric."


This was such a fascinating piece. The stitching was amazing! When I took a closer look to admire the quilting I started to notice the other heads quilted in relief. Wow! This quilt drew me in and got me thinking!

quilting detail of Stephanie Pettengell's Profiles

You can order Kimono Silk threads from our New online shop as well as all the other ranges of Superior Threads. We are the original UK Superior Threads distributors servicing the UK and Europe.

2 comments:

Gertie Pye said...

Amazing quilting!

Martha said...

I liked how each of the 'heads' were quilted differently. Stephanie said that she created the various stitches to suit the personalities of the people in her textile group. What fun! And so neat that simply changing the stitched lines could create such variety in what is essentially a two tone neutral quilt.