New Quilt: For Your Mercy is Great

Since 2013 I've been working on a series of quilts inspired by parts of the Episcopal worship services, mostly our Eucharistic service but also a few parts of our daily office (see all the parts of the series here and here).  There are a few pieces left for the series to be complete and one of them is the Prayers of the People.

This is a part of the service each week where we pray for others, and there are a bunch of different forms in our prayer book, but my favorite is Form VI.

From the Book of Common Prayer, 1982

Form VI

In peace, we pray to you, Lord God.

Silence

For all people in their daily life and work;
For our families, friends, and neighbors, and for those who are alone.

For this community, the nation, and the world;
For all who work for justice, freedom, and peace.

For the just and proper use of your creation;
For the victims of hunger, fear, injustice, and oppression.

For all who are in danger, sorrow, or any kind of trouble;
For those who minister to the sick, the friendless, and the needy.

For the peace and unity of the Church of God;
For all who proclaim the Gospel, and all who seek the Truth.

For [N. our Presiding Bishop, and N. (N.) our Bishop(s); and for] all bishops and other ministers;
For all who serve God in his Church.

For the special needs and concerns of this congregation.

Hear us, Lord;
For your mercy is great.

We thank you, Lord, for all the blessings of this life.

We will exalt you, O God our King;
And praise your Name for ever and ever.

We pray for all who have died, that they may have a place in
your eternal kingdom.

Lord, let your loving-kindness be upon them;
Who put their trust in you.

So that was the text I wanted to feature and the overall design idea was to feature a globe in the center surrounded by the text.  I wanted the globe to be floating in the middle of the quilt, and for some stupid reason I cut it out of my background fabric at the very begining.  There was no need for that, and it make things harder throughout but it worked out in the end.  

For the globe I used all my scraps of silk and organza and polyester to mosaic in the continents and oceans.  If you look closely you'll see two gian prairie dogs in North America that were leftover from this very long ago art quilt (2013-2014!).  I love using scrappy bits from the stash.

I did the mosaic part of the globe at our 4 Common Corners retreat last October and finished the final quilt sometime in early March this year I think.

The background fabric is a piece of dupioni silk that I dyed over Christmas 2023.

My silhouette cutter is pretty much at the end of it's life cycle and really isn't cutting well anymore, so I cut all the letters for this piece on my mom's Brother scan-n-cut.  And unlike other pieces with cut letters, these letters weren't in straight lines so getting them lined up on the quilt was tricky.  I would up using ironable transfer tape which enabled me to pick up big groups of letters of the cutting mat and position them as one, then iron down the letters, then remove the tape.  The transfer tape is what you see below that looks like clear plastic.

The words on the bottom of the circle go with the prayers I shared above, and the words at the top read "Hear us Lord" and "For your mercy is great."

Becuase I was going for a meditative repetitive feel, I wanted the letters to be reasonably low contrast and to run together.  So there are no spaces between workds and the colors blend with the background a little.  It's legible if you get close, but from afar just looks like a big block of text, like the feeling of praying over and over under your breath.

I had a bunch of velvet in my stash from Georgia (who was also the source of the silk- thanks Georgia!) and I wanted to use some of it for the borders.  I auditioned a couple of different colors.  The diamonds are also for the borders and designed to pull colors from the globe.

I wound up deciding to actually use three colors for the border, the gold to pick up the center , the intense dark turquoise, and the sage green.  They were a pain to piece even though just long strips because the velvets are bulky and don't like to feed evenly in my sewing machine, the gold is really lightweight and all of them are very slippery slinky.  I guess that's the penalty for using things that aren't cotton!

After assembling the borders I realized the whole quilt was looking really blue (literally) and needed some contrast.  One of the brocades in the globe had some pink accents and the whole quilt felt like it needed some warmth so I decided to make some pink flowers to go in the borders.  It meant cutting out a million little petals in five different shapes, but I think it added a great spark to the border. A bunch of these were fabrics I'd previously painted so up close they have some nice variation.

Come back later in the week for more on this project!