New Quilt: Our Service Begins on P. 355

As I've talked about many times over the years, I've been working on a series of liturgical quilts inspired by the Episcopal worship services since 2013.  Most of them are aesthetically inspired by illuminated manuscripts, but a couple of them are fairly different, stylistically.  A couple of years ago I made this one, which has a super bright, fun, almost 60s vibe.  It's made of couched yar which covers the whole surface (no fabric is visible, all yarn).  It was a really fun way to doodle quilt and use up small bits of yarn I was unlikely to use for other projects, both of which made me happy.

Since this one was so stylistically different from the others in the series, I wanted to make sure there was at least one more like it, so that it didn't feel like an outlier when the group hung together.  The text in the quilt above comes at the very end of our worship service so I thought it might be fun to bookend the series with one like this that includes the opening text of the worship service.

To make these, I start by basting the fabric and then free-motion quilting the outline of the letters using a paper pattern I make, print out, and pin to the top.  If you look really closely below you can see a few tiny bits of leftover paper I didn't quite get removed yet.  

In this quilt I had two sets of overlapping letters, one for the opening acclamation (in blue/teal) and one for the congregational response (in pink).  Where thye overlap I couched purple yarn.  Because it made a lot of complex shapes, I just marked each one (pink/blue/purple) with my washable markers before couching so I could keep everything straight.

You can see here as it was in progress a lot of the traveling lines between letters,  one of the things I like about this technique is that it is so forgiving.  All of those traveling yarns are just naturally covered up when you quilt in the background.

I quilted in the background around the letters with the same leftover pale yellow-cream yarn I used around the Go in Peace letters from the first quilt!

 

Here's the final thing,  after finishing the letters I quilted in the remaining background in a free doodle pattern.  The yarns were chosen mostly to help use up small bits of things leftover.  I also wanted to pick some colors for the border that sort of balanced out the pink/blue baby quilt feel that I was getting from just the letters.  I love the pink and teal and I picked them for the letters because I had enough of coordinating pinks and teals to do all the letters, but it was feeling a little saccharine at the stage shown above.

In addition to yarn, I couched down some wonderful bits of hand dyed sheep locs that I bought a few years ago at a fiber festival and never used.  they give some extra fun texture when you get close up.

If you look closely at the pink yarn, it's sort of two-tone,  that yarn was originally two giant cones of very thin pink yarn, one fairly pale pink and one more a hot pink that my friend Georgia gave me.  They were too thin to couch alone, but my other friend Melody (who is a spinner) plied a bunch together for me and it was perfect!!  I've just 3D printed myself a spindle so I can do some more plying,  I have a bunch of great colors of really thin yarn from Georgia and I'd love to use it for future projects like this.

Our service begins on P. 355, c. Shannon Conley, 2025

The title, "Our service begins on P. 355" is a cheeky reference to the fact that while the opening words of the Rite II Sunday liturgy are in fact the ones on the quilt, in many many churches, the first words the Priest says in the service every week are "Our service begins on P. 355 in the Book of Common Prayer"  It's probably the most commonly used page of the prayer book, and in many churches the prayer books almost fall open to P.355.  So a little bit of silly Episcopal in joke there.  

Thee are so fun to make,  low stress and high visual impact.  I love using things in my studio and I'm happy to be making progress on this series.