Yellow is my absolute favorite color.
I have repeatedly worked quilts in yellow. My first contemporary quilt bordering on what I try to do now was a yellow monochrome. And I have several other quilts in yellow, either rather monochrome
"Here Comes the Sun (text messages 20)" 2019
Or sometimes in combination with grey(s). Currently, a piece of mine, a lockdown-coping-strategy quilt with a lot of yellow is traveling with the German Patchwork Guild’s presitigious biannual exhibition “Tradition bis Moderne”.
"Mellowed Yellow" 2020/21
So the suggestion for a ‘monochrome’ challenge didn’t pose much of a challenge for me once I had been granted yellow as my color to use. It would have been much more difficult had it been pink. My first thoughts went towards something slightly pictorial, using a good amount of machine quilting as outline of a kind of sculpture on a mostly yellow background. But it was somebody else’s photo, and although I am pretty certain I would have received her permission to use the photo, I hesitated to approach her about it. First I tried to re-enact the idea, using a different kind of flower arrangement.
But it didn’t compare to the original idea, so I wasn’t convinced. I then started a sample trying to teach myself the kantha technique so many people are talking about.
Learned a lot doing that – such as ‘use thicker thread’, ‘ensure more overlap’, ‘sit down when doing it’ (for some reason or other I was doing it standing up at my worktable). And then I thought this would be a nice piece in the entire arrangement. Tried something else, too – what if… I put some pieces with the seam allowances showing on the front side?
It flowed from there.
Piecing scraps and remnant pieces from earlier times.
A bit of yellow mesh from the lemon box. (Not a good idea! You WILL and MUST get entangled in it when quilting!)
By then the title had slipped into my mind, Entangled in Yellow, and it wanted to be visible on the quilt. I wrote the words by hand, enlarged them on the copy machine and stitched on the paper directly on the quilt to transfer the outlines.
Three times, color accentuating one of the three words each in the separate appearances, but reading from the bottom.
Yellow ‘knitted’ string I had made from a gorgeous yellow thread on my ancient Strickliesel doll a long time ago. An attempt to add on to it a bit to have more to entangle the quilt with turned into frustration quickly, though, because the thread was very unyielding and slippery and the whole thing kept slipping off the doll. (Made me wonder how I got to have so much of this to begin with, why I did not stop earlier – but I do remember that I was a bit nerve-wrecked back then, too.
Quilting in a sort of loose echo around the text.
And in the end I added two yellow plastic rings I scavenged from jugs we use for the dialysis machines at work.
These are the 'touchdown' points for the knitted yellow Strickliesel cord.
As Life is entangling me at the moment with my son's High School Graduation and my husband's illness, this shows a bit of my current situation. But yellow is always good.
Comments