It seems to me that not everyone wants pretty pastel things at Easter and so I did a bit of What if? thinking. What if we made some decorations which were based on a bit more sophisticated palette such as coffee and taupe. I also wanted to make samples which are not full-size quilts but are finished and not just obviously samples. It struck me that table runners would be a good way to do a fair bit of a pattern but would not be a marathon task to finish. This linen table runner is from IKEA and costs about a fiver. As my mother would say, you couldn’t buy the fabric for that.
So, I appliquéd some eggs while watching El Cid with the Medieval Historian who was trying to get his class to watch it to talk about how history is used to suit the purposes of the day. It was fascinating that in February 2017 the film seemed to be about good Muslims and bad Muslims and Islamophobia, but when it was made it at the height of the Cold War it was about good Russians and bad (Communist) Russians. That aside, you can get a lot of appliqué done as Chuck Heston races around nobly saving the day.
I had bought the egg fabric on holiday. One of those, I don’t know what I will ever do with it, but it’s a really nice fat quarter and will come in useful at some point. It is made by Organic Cotton. I liked the Downton Abbey type dancing couples. When I looked closely, however, I thought it had more than a touch of the Weimar Republic about it. The young men look very like young ladies in drag:
I used a straightforward hand appliqué technique. I put the fabric over a piece of thick paper which I had cut into an egg shape with my sizzix machine and then gathered round the edge and pressed. I stitched down three quarters of the appliqué with the paper still in, removed it and finished the hand stitching. This is a good technique with anything with circular or particularly curved edges.
I like hand appliqué and found it very relaxing to do, but, looking at the runner laid out in the studio, I think that the eggs need to be nearer the edge. Still quite a successful trial, though, I think.
