Lord's Prayer Finished

Welcome back to the final post on my Lord's Prayer quilt!  You can find the first post about making it here.  

I love this quilt so much, mostly because working on it was so full of memories of Linda and her music.  I love the rich colors, although it's a bit darker than I thought, and very hard to take pictures of.  I'm pleased with the quilting too, especially in the interlocking borders and the little doohickeys surrounding the text.  It has lots of fun fabrics: metallics, velvets, microsuedes, and all sort of other things.

However, I don't think I really captured the joy and groundswell of emotion I feel when singing the music.  I think that's partly because the colors wound up so dark.  I also think it has to do with the number of words.  One thing that's been a challenge in this liturgical series is how many words I have to include.  In many cases, I've used only snippets of prayers or bible verses, but here I really wanted to use the whole prayer (and music).  I think to really capture the joy I feel singing Linda's music, I need to do a more abstract quilt inspired by my feelings while singing, rather than something incorporating the text itself.    Another one of the anthems Linda composed has the love text from Corinthians, and I think that will be something I use for a more abstract musical inspired piece in future.   Unfortunately, I probably won't get to it for a while, there are two other liturgical quilts that will have to come before that as well as a bunch of pieces for shows I'm already committed to this year.  Oh well!  Always more ideas than time!  

Enjoy the pictures of this piece though,  I really do smile every time I see it!

Our Father, c. 2019 Shannon Conley, 73" x 53", photo by Mike Cox.

New Quilt: Lord's Prayer (Last of 2019)

In putting together my year-in-review post, I realized I'd never blogged about one of my biggest (both in terms of size and time) quilts of 2019.  I could have sworn I'd written the posts, but when I went back they were only in draft form with pictures but no writing.  It really is a 2019 quilt so I guess I need to get to it!

The quilt is part of my liturgical series and features the text of the Lord's Prayer set to music composed by my dear friend Linda Kelly.  For years and years, every Sunday we sang it to her music and it filled me with so much joy.  Here is a very old crummy recording, hopefully in spite of the bad recording quality you can her the glory in her music.  I recorded that at Linda's twentieth anniversary celebration at church, and singing it every Sunday is one of the things I miss dearly now that she is not longer our choir director and organist.  

I knew I wanted the Lord's prayer piece of my series to feature her music, so I started looking at images of medieval illuminated hymnbooks.  The musical notation during the medieval period was quite different to modern musical notation, but I think what I came up with worked ok.

You may remember that when I was making the liturgical calendar border for the MES banner commission early in 2019, the first one I made was backward.  I really wanted to use it, so I incorporated it into this piece as part of the illuminated "O" at the beginning of "Our".  Because the backwards border was the full size of the banner, using it as only a small part of this quilt meant that the overall Lord's Prayer quilt would be quite large.

This is the border, you can see it next to the original plan for the MES quilt, it's about 20x30 ish.

I designed the interlocking patterns that fill the O and cut them on my silhouette.  The O itself is dark green velvet though it's difficult to see here.

This is the fabric I chose for the background of the whole quilt.  This is actually the back (the front is the shiny red you see in the next picture), but I liked the very subtle texture when you look up close.

I cut all the letters on my silhouette out of some sort of shiny gold fabric and getting everything up there straight was the biggest challenge!  Especially because the musical staff lines also had to be as straight as possible.  Don't you just love that wretched scorch mark?  I was so angry when I did that.  And it's still there in the final quilt, though hopefully not so pronounced.... 

All these little squares were what I used for the musical notes.  I had a bunch left over, and someday I swear I'm going to use them up for something!

Here it is all laid out and ready for quilting.  It's quite large, so it was challenging to quilt on my home machine.  

Those interlocking borders were fused down and then stitched around.  A couple of little edges had to be glued down and unfortunately a little glue globbed out.  I tried a bunch of different solvents to remove the glue, but none were successful and several started dissolving my fabrics!  I was so glad I tested them on this swatch!  In the end I just covered up the glue spot with quilting.

Come back on Monday to see the final piece!