#46 Bountiful Basket

#46: Bountiful Basket
Finished: 11/18/12
Technique: Tiled Piecing, Mosaic, Free-motion quilting
Size: 13" x 18 1/2"

Description: This mini-quilt combines the theme of Thanksgiving and trying to make the design look like a tiled mosaic. I am thankful for many things this year, but right now I am thankful that this mini-quilt is finished! This has proven to be the most time-consuming project to date, and one of the most difficult. I vastly underestimated the time it would take to finish this project, and in an effort to get it done in time, the work is sloppy at best and not up to my usual standards. Having said that, however, I am still very much intrigued with this technique and think it holds great potential for spectacular designs. I'll need to experiment with how to deal with the myriad of problems I encountered during the process.

My original thought was to portray a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, a typical Thanksgiving composition.  I picked out the fabrics to represent the corn, cabbage, apples, cucumber, squash, grapes, basket, sky, and grout. That was the fun and easy part. I then sketched a basic design and overlaid a grid, hoping to follow it for placement of individual pieces.

The pieces of fabric had to be small by necessity. I cut the "tile" pieces 1" square (for a finished 1/2") and I cut the "grout" lines 5/8" ( for roughly 1/8" finished width). I didn't worry too much about the evenness of the sewing, figuring the slight variances in widths would make it appear more like an actual mosaic. I sewed the pieces in columns then used long strips of the grout fabric to connect the columns.

One of the first problems I encountered was that my sketch was too small. The fruits and vegetables were just colored blobs; they needed to be bigger in order for the observer to recognized them as fruits and vegetables. At this point I should have re-done the sketch, but I thought I could get by without doing so. That was a mistake.

Another problem was that my round fruits were coming out square. I thought about replacing certain pieces with half-square triangles to round off the corners, but that would have involved a great deal more time. I decided to "fix" it in the end with circular free-motion quilting.

Because the pieces are small, there is quite a lot of bulk in the seam. As I was sewing the columns together, the mini-quilt kept rolling in on itself, making it difficult to work with. This also led to an "accordion" effect, making the piece very stretchy (and it had a great deal of rebound). This later gave me grief when I was quilting. You will notice that parts of the sky are far too wavy.

I soon realized I wasn't going to be able to finish the cornucopia design; it was going to take far too long. So I lopped off the tail and made it into a basket lying on its side.

There are parts of this design that I particularly like. The yellow squash, the grapes, and the one vertical ear of corn turned out nicely. (The other ear of corn is rather wonky.) I also like the sky, which was cut from a large scale blue gingham.

As frustrating as this project was, I want to try this technique again. I've learned quite a lot, and have a lot of ideas of what to change for the next time.