Just for Fun

Back at the beginning of our Illumination challenge, I was toying with the idea of an illuminated manuscript and how it relates to fabric. The illumination in historic books and bibles is often the initial caps, or first letters on a page or paragraph. In textiles, we find fancy letters on monograms. 

I particularly liked the idea of a monogram because I could do it all by hand while everything I owned (including my two sewing machines) was packed up and sent halfway around the world. Then I got sidetracked by the flashlight quilt. 

In the end, I decided to complete this quilt too. It was a pretty good airplane project since it's so small. I embroidered the "Illuminated" Chi-Rho at about 3000 feet somewhere between Greenland and Helena, Montana (which has nothing to do with the concept of this piece, it's just kinda fun to say).

To round out the heirloom textile feel of this piece, I quilted it by hand and then added the crocheted border. To be honest, although I had finished the embroidery and quilting by our deadline,  I had no way to upload photos to the blog so I took my time with the crochet and finally finished it a week late. So this is more of an aside than an official contribution.

I really like the idea of this and thoroughly enjoyed making it, but in the end, I'm not completely happy with some of the fabric and color choices. If I had it to do again, I'd try a darker "glow" behind the monogram to set it off from the shirt, and then probably make the monogram lighter for contrast. The crocheted border is nice, but although the color is pretty with the plaid of the shirt, I think it draws the eye away from the monogram too much. If this were my "official" quilt for the challenge and if I had the time, I'd do it over, but since it's not, and the idea here is to experiment and learn, I'm not going to worry about it.

Now I DO need to get serious about our Shelter challenge.

:-)