For Love---

Close up of the inner section of the back

 Our book club read "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern.  At the time, I had finished participating in a free-motion quilting challenge that Darlene did in 2012 on her SewCalGal blog. She now blogs at 

Creative Latitude; but is currently taking a break. 

I hope she and her inner squirrel, Sally, are well. I miss them! In 2013, Darlene hosted another free motion quilting challenge and Pasty Thompson provided a tutorial about how to quilt borders.  

Close up of the inner section of the front

This piece is inspired by Pasty's tutorial. It is about 18 inches square. The fabric came from my "chunk" scraps. I needed to add a bit to have enough "rounds" for my plan. 

Close up of the outer border of the back

"The Night Circus" story follows the consequences of a wager to the death between two magicians about which is the better. . .new magic or old magic. 

The two "pawns"are  the daughter of one magician and an orphaned boy of the other magician. Wouldn't you know it, the two fall in love and then learn of the duel. Is there a way out of the challenge or is one of the characters destined to lose and die? 

I was inspired by all the color that was in the book and surprised about where it wasn't. For example, the colors of the circus were black and white. There was one character that was always clothed in gray.

I remember that the colors, when introduced, represented an emotion. At the end of the book, there is a huge bonfire and all the colors are represented. While I wasn't able to recreate the bonfire graphic I saw in my head, I was able to use thread and filler designs to represent the colors. I don't remember what each color represented now. When I was quilting this project, I selected the thread colors based on the colors the author wrote in the text.

Close up of outer border of the front

What I found interesting was that although I used the same thread top and bottom of the project, it looks totally different! Sometimes the thread blended and sometimes it popped against the background.  

I used Floriani metallic thread in at least three areas, red bananas, green leaves and blue swirls.

To mark my stitching areas, I stitched lines in yellow thread. For those red hearts, I did complete a continuous free motion design. I was mindful to stitch as close to the yellow line as possible when I traveled so it appears that I did a lot of starting and stopping when you look at the back; but, I really didn't! When you view the same area from the front, the yellow line disappears!

View of finished back

I was surprised to see how iridescent blue that purple thread looked on the back. On the front it looked purple!

It was challenging to create the same size shape each time. It was challenging to figure out what to do for the corner. Sometimes, I chalked lines to give me points to stay within which helped me with the keeping the size of the motifs relatively equal.

I named the piece: For Love. I finished it in
2013. Because I used scraps to complete this project, I'm linking to Cynthia at Oh Scrap/Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework.

Finished front