African Quilt pt.3

With a clear view of the source inspiration for this piece I began looking at quilt design ideas.

I also looked at an idea I had used on a recent piece, where I made a large and a small quilt and stitched the small one onto the surface of the larger. Below is a photo showing the edge of the smaller quilt lying on the background quilt.

This would allow me to use the fabulous yellow fabric from Esther as my background while I then created a smaller piece using the shape and colour and feel of the sun on the water.

When I got to this stage I was really happy with the concept and could then bring together the fabrics I would use to suggest the sunset on the river. My stash is more than adequate and a recent purchase of another piece of Esther's fabric fitted with the concept as well.

I also realised that a piece of cotton damask created by Nene Jallow from The Gambia would fit with this scheme as well. (the bottom swatch)

As I will have a significant amount of the yellow Esther fabric as a whiolecloth quilt, I needed to give a lot of thought to the quilting of it.

The photo from the river, showing the patterning of the ripples suggested a simple watery horizontal quilting to me.

My design included putting a vertical stril through this yellow fabric, would that affect the quilting? Another sample needed.

My feeling was that the strip did not necessitate changing the quilting pattern.

Now I had to try out my idea for the smaller top quilt, stitching strips of colour. Did it matter id the strips were straight or curved? I decided that it was an abstraction from the photo and therefore quite OK to use straight lines.

I like the hand stitching, and plan to continue any of these lines through into the background quilt to anchor the two pieces together.

Now I just have to get stitching for real and make this quilt!!