"Emoture" my Temperature Quilt
I remember seeing my friend Kathy Strawson posting on Facebook about the "Temperature Quilt" that she was making for a significant birthday, a beautiful appliqué circle on a square for each day.
So I had to look up "Temperature Quilt", as you do, and I found out how big a trend it was, all sorts of patterns and techniques, just lovely.
And so the idea stewed for awhile! Forward to Christmas 2018, Kim Caskey and myself sitting in my kitchen discussing the idea once more. We both wanted more that just recording the daily temperature, we both wanted to record emotions too. Hence the title "Emoture"
I decided to make a quilt from the date of my 50th birthday to the date of my 51st birthday, a year and a day of temperatures and emotions!
I spend some time looking up fabrics and deciding on what colours I wanted, how many, what quantities to order, etc..
I then made out a template with the temperature ranges, fabrics and emotions to follow as I recorded.
Designing the pattern was another matter, I wanted the quilt for my bed, so it had to be big, I like a quilt to touch the ground! I used EQ7 to draw out the template once I knew what I wanted.
Maths is not one of my best subjects, so working out sizes took awhile.
I decided that I wanted to foundation paper piece the background and then appliqué the circles on top. I printed out the foundation pattern onto a product I use for foundation paper piecing called "Magic Papers" (which you can leave in) and I printed out the templates so that I could easily cut the shapes I needed.
I had a special notebook and pen that I used to record all the information, first thing every morning and last thing at night I recorded how I was feeling and the high and lowest daily temperatures. About once a week I would cut out all the pieces carefully following my colour guide and machine pieced the background. I used the Apliquick technique and tools to prepare the circles and hand stitched them onto the background whenever I got the chance. They went everywhere with me, Scotland, England, Jordan, and Japan!
I machine embroidered each month on some low volume text fabric and cut lots of fabrics for the background ( I got a set of six placemat backgrounds from the leftovers!) and as each month moved into the next I assembled the rows.
Slowly but surely the quilt grew, I found it hard that I had no control over the colours I used, apart from my initial selection of temperature degrees and emotions, I did not like the amount of green and oranges that were appearing, but I kept going and stuck to my fabric guide template, and it grew on me!!
Finally the top was together and the task of quilting the monster began, it was on and off the longarm more times, as I had quilts for customers to quilt. First I quilted in the ditch, then around the diamonds and finally the circles. As it's got two layers of batting, cotton and wool, it weights a ton!
As I write this it's getting its first viewing at The Festival of Quilts in Birmingham at the moment and I look forward to snuggling under it come wintertime.
Will I make another Temperature quilt, maybe, for the next big birthday, we'll see!
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