Remembering A Sister

So there was a post a few months ago about having to make the saddest quilt ever.  The family that it went to loved it.  And they wanted a quilt that their oldest can have that was similar but different.  So I decided to try my hand at thread art.  And while I'm not sure that what I really did was actual thread art, I'm happy with the results.  And so are they from the photos that I sent them.


So this was the original quilt.  It had the Trisomy 18 awareness ribbon, and an elephant.  Both in the Trisomy color.  And I did a basic line quilting.

So what the mom wanted was an elephant quilt without the ribbon.  And something a little bigger.  Problem with a quilt like this is that the quilting part is hard.  I like stitch in a ditch quilt pattern.  Something to not take away from the pattern.  But there is no pattern here.  So as I was waiting during soccer practice one day I heard a podcast about taking a thread art class.  So basing my quilt design off of that description, I came up with doing the elephant and the rest of the quilt was going to be thread art.  I wanted a kid-like picture of the elephant doing something.  Now the original quilt was 12" by 18" or so.  And this ended up being 36" by 42".  That's a lot of white space.  And since it was for the toddler daughter of this family, I decided to incorporate the daughter that became an angel too soon.

I appliqued the blue elephant.  Then I reversed the image and quilted another elephant in a metallic baby colored variegated thread.  I envisioned a lot of symbolism here.  Not sure if it got through or not.

Now for the remaining background I decided to make it a kiddie drawing.  Which was relatively easy since I'm not an artist.  I planned on a park theme.  And since it's windy here I thought about kites.  So the blue elephant is flying a kite.

And of course, it's always sunny at the park.  Right?  So I put a smiling sun in the corner.

The elephants are standing in front of a big tree.  Equipped with a squirrel hole.  And a hanging bird house.

And then of course, because it's for a little girl, the grass is covered in flowers.  I used a purple variegated thread and a red variegated thread.  And just a plain pastel pink.   Then I used dark green for the grass and light green for the flower stems.

And then the rest of the "sky" was just white thread to help with the "wind".  I figured it would look a lot better than straight lines.   And the back and binding was this pink, purple, and gold butterfly fabric.

I think she's going to love.  At least I hope so.  I'm fairly proud that I was able to pull this off.  I wasn't sure I could.  It may become my preferred method of quilting.