Sewdreamy

This quilt, representing King Arthur and the knights of the round table, was designed by my oldest son Ken Tatum, who gifted the design along with the digital files, the fabrics, and the threads to me for my birthday in March 2016.  I had to figure out how to make his beautiful design.  This quilt is the third in my ongoing series of ancient illuminated manuscript-inspired quilts.  The text below the central picture is in old English.  I had the throne room in the background, which he provided as a separate digital design file, printed by Spoonflower on cotton.  Then I appliqued the people's bald heads (digitally painted and printed on cotton), clothes, swords, table and 3 dimensional wall hangings.  I free motion embroidered their hair and the crowns.  I digitized the chain mail shirts for the king and knights and machine embroidered them with variegated silver gray thread on black.  The Celtic borders were the biggest challenge.  I marked the green satin, free motion/ruler stitched the long borders, and digitized the corner designs in simple single line stitching and machine embroidered them in my embroidery module.  Then I painted the border designs.  After piecing the quilt top together and sandwiching the quilt with two layers of batting (thin polyester and wool), I free motion quilted this quilt on my new Bernina Q20 sitdown longarm.  This provided the opportunity to give the border designs their Celtic dimension (over and under dimension).  I also attached the banners after quilting and hand stitched them down to maintain their 3 D appearance.  Check out my blogs on the making of this quilt and tutorials for making the chain mail and the Celtic borders.