Crazy Quilt Embroidery

This is a detail of a small quilt I made about fifteen years ago For a long time , I thought I would make a large Crazy quilt , but this little quilt convinced me otherwise. It took more am month to complete. So I decided to be satisfied with confining my self to small when it comes to Crazy quilts.
This little quilt did win a best in Class for miniatures in the Marin Quilt and Needlework Show in San Raphael CA. I was pretty happy but there was more to come. I was contacted by a representative of Hallmark cards and they commissioned to make an even smaller quilt. About 12 inches square. It was to be part of a group of Victorian collectibles. Yay! On the upside, I was paid very well, on the downside, well, this was a time when our country was in a recession and the whole project was scrapped. Nevertheless, I was excited almost be a part of a fun project!

I went on a few years later to make a larger, but still small Crazy quilt. I challenged myself to use only silk for the embroidery.


I used silk ribbon.


Silk twist.


Silk embroidery floss.

The stitches were lazy daisy, bullion knots, Palestrina knots, herringbone, french and colonial knots, stem stitch, feather stitch and more.
There are also quite a few beads tacking down ribbon streamers, etc. I love this quilt despite the fact that it does not hang well due to a miscalculation on my part. Apparently I made the borders a little too long and did not pick up on this until all the edge feather stitching was complete and I had layered an bound the edges. Bummer! I agonized over this for awhile and decided to let well enough alone.