Pump Up the Volume

For September, "A Focus Through the Prism Project Quilting" challenge focused on Flying Geese. Initially, I sketched up ideas incorporating flying geese into a glowing sun--but never really liked any of the designs. While searching for various triangle images on Pinterest, I found inspiration in a very unlike source: painted finger nail designs creating the play, rewind and fast forward buttons. I immediately recognized the flying geese shapes in these buttons and was able to draft up these shapes easily enough in EQ7 for some foundation piecing.

Rewind, Play, Pause and Fast Forward

Classic 80s!!

I had thought about creating a SONY Walkman (as I still have the color yellow left to tackle), but got stuck on composition. But then I thought of the iconic 80's boombox!! Think of John Cusack holding up the big ole boombox in Say Anything...or hip hop fans/musicans carrying a ginormous boombox on their shoulders. Yes, I am totally a child of the 80s!! Blue/teal fabric was selected for that glowing green/blue often used in electronics.

So next up was to create my cassette tape (or the portion that would be visible through the tape deck). Using an image for inspiration, I set out to recreate my own free-form cassette using various fabrics that gave the illusion of the reels, tape and label design, along with a micron pen and some simple stitching to add some embellishments to the cassette label.

My cassette tape remixed using fabric and embellishments

With these two design hurdles complete, the rest of the quilt top came together easily adding units to represent the speaker panels, radio, handles, etc. As always I had some fun with the quilting. For the first time, I tried adding some trapunto in each of the speakers. While machine appliquing on the speakers, I included an extra layer of batting on the backside. Once done stitching, I carefully trimmed away the extra batting. This extra loft combined with surrounding dense zig zag stippling really helped add extra volume and loft to make the speakers pop...I love it!! Two large buttons were added for radio/volume dials.