Under the Sea

Finally, fishes in their habitat is done. What I see in my imagination never turns out exactly as I envisioned but this is close enough.

The sky with a crocheted sun, the water with lace waves lapping the shore, and seashells at the seashore.  The seashells are embroidered felt and the sand dollars are stamped acrylic paint.  There are some stamped fishes, too. This was my first venture into stamping. I loved the technique. I hope the heat-set paint holds up.

 Susanne asked if I could add zippers. Pricey trinkets at today's prices for a donated item, but I found one in my notions stash to try out. I made a little pocket and there's a surprise inside: felt goldfish on a satin ribbon stream.

  Flipflops on a ribbon were around some washcloths I bought recently. I gave the zipper a ribbon pull tab and a green grosgrain ribbon anchor tab to hold onto when zipping.

 

There's a pocket, every quilt gets at least one pocket. If you count the zipper, this one has 2.

The center part has 6 reverse applique fish, each a different texture. Linen, plain cotton print are shown here.

One of the 'fish' is just a silk circle with 2 little folded points that could be fishes entering the area. The other three are felt, linen and a piece of lining fabric, silky to touch. I couched several different yarns and used crochet thread in the bobbin to stitch a decorative pattern from the back side.

Green organza ribbon is couched to form seaweed, too.

I kept wondering why quilt clubs showed their donation quilts as just random pieces of fabric with touch items like zippers just stitched on and odd bits of fringe and stuff with little attention to colors and patterns and maybe a theme. 

The answer to my question was heart-breaking. They said, "Don't make them pretty. The touch is the thing for the residents. If you make pretty and bright and attractive, they will likely be stolen."

I decided to make mine as interesting as possible given what I have to work with, and add a feature that makes theft less tempting: a label. I roughly added the initials of the facility: MCNH on a bright tag that can't be missed. I embroidered it over and over so picking it out would be too painstaking to a thief and stitched it several times to the front. Then I stitched through all that into the whole quilt when the backing was on.

Just in case that is not enough, I made a regular label, printed with a fabric marker that is supposedly permanent and stitched it on the back side with enough lines of tiny machine stitches to make removing it difficult.


I'd like to think that theft is not a problem around here in small towns. Not so. A small blooming plant in a dollar cache pot that I sent to Miss Trudy when she was in another facility near here was taken from her room. Her sister visited daily and knew the day after it was taken. It was blooming and fine the day before when she visited, so it was not discarded because it died.
I also branded the quilt with my initials stamped in white acrylic paint, a fanciful JC in cursive so the J makes a butterfly's wings. The rest of my quilts will all wear a butterfly brand.