Project Quilting 11.3: Put a Heart on It

It's been fun experimenting with wholecloth quilting designs during this season of Project Quilting. When this week's challenge theme of Put a Heart on It was announced, I started sketching out a variety of heart-shaped filler motifs. Initially I had murky visions of a swedish woven heart or a log cabin heart, but both patterns had a limited variety of shapes and spaces to showcase the growing collection of filler designs. While researching Zentangles for design inspiration, I saw several Zentangle designs that resembled a crazy quilt. My own heart started to beat a little faster as my excitement grew over the idea of creating a modern crazy quilt!

My excitement grew as I teased out the details of my design onto freezer paper, which was quickly translated into fabric and thread play!

The blue feather featuring heart-shaped plumes was lovely all on its own, but I couldn't resist adding a little hyperquilting. Stitching just a few small details in a contrasting yellow thread totally transforms this design!!

Here is another detail shot of the quilting...

My love of thread resulted in several thread purchases while attending Pacific International Quilt Festival and Road to California. This project was the perfect opportunity to experiment with a bold color palette using mostly 40wt threads including:

• Superior Thread's Omni 40wt in School Bus, Willow, and Blue Teal (large cones)
• Superior Thread's King Tut 40wt in Limestone, DeNile, and Egyptian Princess (center spools)
• Aurifil 40wt in Pumpkin Spice and Plum (left and right most spools)
• Aurifil 50 wt in Medium Red and Medium Purple (orange spools used in background quilting and purple with the binding)

Seeing the Victorian crazy quilts inspired me to finally pull out my small stash of silk fabrics and play! While I love the look of silk fabrics, I avoided using them in my projects due to:
1. Silk fabrics are nearly 2x the price of quilting cotton
2. My perceptions that they were too delicate to handle and/or too difficult to use
3. I lacked the confidence in my own skills to do justice by these precious fabrics!

I chose a Thai silk with orange and purple threads handwoven together to create this beautiful salmon color. Some precautions I took include:
1. Using the silk setting on my iron to press the fabric
2. Backing the silk with an ultra-lightweight fusible interfacing
3. Installing a brand new top-stitch needle to avoid snags
4. Spray basting instead of pin-basting

Unfortunately one precaution that I neglected to take was cleaning out my iron prior to using steam to fuse the interfacing. Yes, my iron spewed out a few drops of old water that caused some discoloration along the edges of my precious silk fabric!! Thankfully these spots were totally unrecognizable once the background was filled in with quilted texture.

Other than this little blip, I absolutely loved, loved, LOVED stitching on silk fabric!! My only regret was waiting so long to give silk fabric a try. So be prepared to see more silk fabrics incorporated into my future projects!!

Crazy in Love, finishes 20" x 17"

Per the rules for this week's challenge, our finished pieces must have a heart somewhere on the front. It can be in the print of a fabric, in a block’s piecing, a theme we use or just something we tack on at the end. I was curious as to how many hearts I stitched into my finished design and so I counted each and every one of them. According to my calculations, there are more than 370 hearts stitched into my design, with several more that were lost while trimming/binding.

Adding to the precious factor of this project was using one of my all-time, absolute favorite ombre prints for the backing. 

Show the other Project Quilting participants some love by checking out all the fabulous Put a Heart On It entries featuring one or more hearts!