After The Guardian Angel and William in the Window my friends third child, a girl,was to have a design based on a Flower Fairy by Cicely Mary Barker. I had a nodding acquaintance with the artist and her works but was not fully familiar.
They picked the Willow Fairy. Now previous quilts have been worked out using the cross stitch pattern and whilst there is a cross stitch pattern for the Willow Fairy (which maintains the theme) the quilt design was extrapolated from a photocopy of the illustration in a book owned by the intended recipients mother. I understood at the time there was the intent, as had been the case with the previous quilts, for the design to be cross stitched too, by either the mother or the grandmother in the family.
I used silk paints to get the shaded colours of the four solid leaves. The other leaves were outlined in shades of green embroidery thread. The hair took a long time and a lot of thread, at least two skeins and four, or was it five shades. That resulted in it looking like stump work.
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| Willow Fairy, appliquéd and quilted |
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| Willow Fairy |
The face was a bit loose and I gave her a face lift, tucking the loose "skin" up into the hair line. The wings are made of voile, now it did worry me a bit that they might wear through however, I decided to go with it, thinking if they did, the satin stitched edges and veins would keep the wing section of the image intact and she would just have outlined pink wings.
The intended recipient was not a baby at the time of making and had, by the time I was working on her quilt, formed a firm opinion about the best colour in the world, pink.
So Willow Fairy went onto pale pink marbled material again shot with metallic thread.
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| Willow Fairy quilt |
I quilted it to reflect the ripples in the water and further willow leaves in pink.
I was quite pleased with the result.
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| Back of the quilt |
Once again I patched the back to include the recipients initials. Having run out of the pink for the back I used some yellow metallic shot that had a hint of pink to it in combination with some blue. I bound it with the same green material as the flower fairies dress.
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| Willow Fairy quilt,recent picture |
Here is the quilt being held up by its owner (fingers top right). You may be able to see the colour of the quilt better in this picture. Willow Fairy still has her wings so far.
