Today I’m sharing details of Jetsam, a quilt I made some years ago. It was an interesting experiment, combining fabric I had hand dyed with knitted pieces and plenty of hand stitching to hold it together. This is the fabric and the selection of threads I used for stitching. I chose green and blue shades in different thicknesses.
After using running stitches along the main dye lines to hold the three layers together, I knew the design would look flat without extra embellishment.
Using large knitting needles, I knitted segments loosely, using a variegated cotton yarn and increasing and decreasing the stitches as I went. This was to make the knitting roughly fit the shapes of the background sections. I stitched these pieces to the quilt.
Finally, I filled in areas of the background with seed stitch, one of my favourite filler stitches. Here are detail photos.
And here is the finished quilt. It is 50 cm square.
Sometimes it’s easy to keep making quilts that are similar to ones we have made in the past. Creating a design with different techniques can jump-start a new way of thinking.