Embellishment

My next activity was to embellish a quilt. I didn’t want to make another quilt just to do some embellishment so I looked through the work so far and decided to use the pumpkin piece from Module 1.

I like to do some embellishment on my quilts, but I’m not a great fan of OTT bits and bobs on quilts, so it was quite hard to decide what to do. I looked at my original painting of the pumpkin and decided that the seeds could somehow be added – hence the beads, which are larger than I would usually use, but look seed-like to me. They are also the colours of the seeds as I had painted them. I added them to the quilted pumpkin rather than to the main pumpkin shape as they would have been lost there. I felt that they would draw the eye to the quilted pumpkin and catch the viewer’s attention and cause the viewer to look at that area too.

The seed-shaped quilting in the main shape was not so eye-catching as I would have liked, so I decided to add some foiling there. It would not be immediately obvious – depending on how the light falls on it – but would also draw the viewer in to look at the quilting there. I tried to add the foil within the seed shapes using powder glue. I was mostly successful, but some of it got away – outside the seed shaped area. Using the glue powder needs more practice I could have tried scraping it off, but experience tells me you end up making more of a mess than accepting serendipity.