New Quilt: Alleluia Alleluia

A couple months ago, while I was working on some more complicated quilt designs I decided to start something simpler so I could just have something to sew on.  It was right around the time when I was really trying to get used to my new longarm so a lot of quilting was appealing to me.  

I started it right at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine, and it was so heartbreaking (it's still heartbreaking), and I wanted to try to do something colorful and hopeful.  I decided to start with the phrase we use as our dismissal in church, which seemed fitting since going into the world in peace seemed like something we needed. 

After drafting the pattern, I pinned it down to a quilt sandwich and stitched around the letters in light grey thread.  You can see in the picture below, the very light thread outlining the word And between love and serve.  After outline stitching the words, I tore off the pattern and started quilting.  Instead of regular quilting, I decided to try out free-motion couching using some of my stash yarn.  It was so much fun and worked really well with the free-motion couching foot on my machine.  All the freedom of free-motion quilting but with the bright thick line of color you'd usually associated with fabric and paint.

The color story was largely dictated by the yarn I had on hand, but you'll notice the same blue and yellow we've been seeing all over recently.  After doing the letters I started outlining them and then just kept filling in.  I didn't really care about the color of the background fabric since I planned to cover the whole thing with yarn.

You can actually see in the picture on the left that there's a bunch of regular quilting along the left side; that's because this started out as a big practice quilt sandwich that I decided to use for a real quilt!

After steadily filling and filling and filling until it was all covered, here's the final piece. The edges were finished with zig-zagged couched yarn.  It took a long time to fill in the background, but it was very restful.  Easy to quilt on for 20 or 30 minutes at a time.  All the extra yarn makes it fairly heavy, heavier than you'd think from the size of it (it's 39" x 25")

Here are a few closeups.

Alleluia, Alleluia, c. 2022 Shannon Conley

I really enjoyed this couching process and I'll probably use it again in future.  And now this slightly psychedelic quilt can take its place in my series of liturgical quilts.