Studio Series: Shadow Hope 4

Shadow: Hope #4 © Karen Thiessen 

Shadow: Hope #4 is one of my problem children. A few years ago I started substituting a middle layer of cloth in place of cotton quilt batting to shift the texture. The result is that the quilts are flatter with more subtle texture. I pieced the back fabric and placed the seam face up so that it would be concealed between the layers. This would have worked fine had I used quilt batting. I finished stitching the quilt, took it off the frame and hung it on my quilt wall for a long look. That's when I noticed a subtle line -- the seam of the back layer was noticeable when hung on a vertical surface. Hope #4 took hundreds of hours to dye, piece, and stitch-- what was I to do? I left it on the wall and busied myself with another quilt and then the solution came to me: sew a line of buttons along the line to highlight it. I call it a shine line or a spine and the quilt is better with it.


The entire Shadow series is built on mistakes-- the fabrics began as botched screen prints and dye jobs that I flipped over and hand-painted with dyes. You can read more about the series here. See, mistakes can be a good thing.