Make Me a Quilt : Janet's Quilt

Leaves for Janet
Hand dyed cottons and silks, some commercial fabrics, fused section in silks, machine pieced and hand quilted with pearl cotton thread and machine quilted. 14.75" x15.5"
I completely forgot about taking my time to enjoy the process, and just steamed on until I finished. But, needless to say I DID enjoy the process. Ha!
Here's what I learned: To include silks in a pieced quilt (my intention for all of these MMAQ's) one has to fuse the bits of silk to each other, and then fuse that to a piece of cotton, so it can be pieced into the composition, just like the rest of the cottons. It worked like a dream. I used some shantung, dupioni, and charmeuse and then pieced lots of yellows, greens, oranges and reds in cottons and found ways to assemble them all into a composition. I was in the 'zone'.

The hand stitching was done through just the top and the batting, before the backing was added, and then it was quilted through all three layers.
The only difficulty I had was to photograph the red and greens straight on. The second photo is the closest color, but it is much more intense in real life.
My sister Brooke has been busy making a new quilt too. This is Regeneration,

Fused hand dyed cottons, with one batik mixed in, machine quilted. It's about 30x40".
Here's a detail of the quilting:

And here's Tony trying to look innocent. I caught him chomping on that plastic pencil, grabbed my camera, and then he dropped it, as though he had no intention of chewing it to bits. We know better.