[personal] By popular demand, more on the quilt

Thanks for the compliments on the quilt.  It was made for you with lots of love from family members. By the way, I put fourteen book covers (counting Endeavor without title and author) in the quilt.

I know that both Dad and Q spent time perfecting the scanning of your book covers to achieve the best image. You would have to ask them for comments on that subject.  Uncle Lloyd has lots of experience printing photos, but putting them on fabric was a bit different.  He experimented and spent lots of time, I am sure, to produce the finished product.  You can ask him to share his expertise.

As to “quilting techniques”, you may share the following with your fan, unless you think it is too much information.

Love,

Mom

“There are five rows of five blocks each in the body of the quilt. The quilt blocks are 5x8 finished.  Book covers alternate with blocks of pieced batiks, each containing eight different fabrics.  I placed the blocks based on the colors of the adjacent book covers. No two batik blocks are alike.  The top row consists of one book cover placed horizontally and four sawtooth stars.

First I stitched- in- the- ditch around each block.  Then I heavily quilted each batik block. I used a decorative stitch on the sashing.  The thread is variegated in shades of yellow and orange.  All this firmly anchored the quilt together.

I wanted the book covers to be the focal point so did not want quilting to overwhelm the image.  I used outline and echo quilting mostly, with a few instances of decorative stitching.   The thread color was dictated by the color or colors in the cover, so the quilting would blend in.  Some book covers required more than one color thread.

The printed book cover fabric is a bit thicker and stiffer than quilting fabric.  I used a thin, sharp needle (size 11) to quilt the covers, and I changed needles often.

The border fabric of green tone on tone and the four corner stars are quilted with variegated green thread, from light to dark.

Luckily the backing fabric of aloha shirts is very colorful, so all the different thread colors blend in nicely.  Incidentally, I found that fabric one and a half years ago and it screamed “Jay” so I bought it immediately.”