Quilt Art by Lena Pugachova: Owls and Feathers

Ta-da! A big finish:

This is a bed quilt for my daughter's owl-themed room and I'm so excited to finish it as it has a lot of new-to-me aspects.

As I'm concentrating of curve piecing and developing a kind of Art-Deco inspired style with clean shapes and high contrast colours, I wanted to see how this style can translate to bed quilts. Me daughter's room already has curtains with an owl pattern that I designed and had printed at Spoonflower, and she said she would like a quilt in owl fabrics, too. I searched the Internet for fabrics that would suit the colour and style of our owls and discovered the "Where the Wise Things Are" collection by Quilting Treasures. I ordered two fabrics from it and complemented them by two from "Stonehenge Solstice" collection by Northcott, and I really love how they play together.

I wanted the blocks to have a stylised feather shape as I had the backing fabric with feathers and I am still planning to have wallpaper printed with the same feather pattern. After a lot of sketching and fiddling in Illustrator I came up with a block shape that repeats in rows in opposite directions, so that half of the blocks are in one colour way and the other half in a different one.

The blocks were all machine-pieced using the same technique that I describe in my Butterfly Block tutorial. It took quite a lot of time, but they went together without much trouble.

Even before I started the quilt, I had minky fabric printed at Spoonflower with a pattern I designed to complement the curtains. It was used a temporary bed spread, but intended all the time as the backing for the quilt.

The problem was that I only had two meters of it, which is exactly the length of the finished quilt I needed (I know it's not a good idea, but I could only order the fabric in full meters and it is quite expensive to order a additional meter when you only need 2-inch margins). I had to position my batting and top extremely carefully and was lucky to get away with just a sliver of white unprinted minky showing on one side.

You see, it's actually reversible. And I'll have to make a separate post about the curtains.

I had never made a quilt with minky backing before, but I read up and was prepared to its stretching and shifting. I always prefer to quilt bed quilts quite loosely, with minky it's particularly important, so I chose to support the feather idea in the quilting and free motioned simple "strands" in each of the blocks. Together with the fabric patterns, I think the texture makes this quilt quite luxurious.

It also turned out quite heavy, although I used fleece instead of my usual batting in an attempt to make it more light-weight; but I hope the wight will help it stay in place on the bed during the day.

Especially if our new furry baby comes to visit:

As he hasn't appeared on the blog yet, I might take the chance to introduce him: this is Loki, he's two and a half months at the moment and he's been with us for a couple of weeks now. He wasn't inclined to take part in the photoshoot, preferring to jump around, but he loves playing hide-and-seek in the corners of the bed.

And he colour matches the quilt, too :))))

So, all in all the quilt turned out fine and I think these blocks are very versatile, so I was wondering if anybody would be interested in if I made it into a pattern?