Amish Wedding Ring

Being contrary again, I decided to make this quilt in non traditional colours - choosing colours the Amish often use in their quilts. My last year of school was spent as an AFS exchange student in Iowa and sometimes we would drive through the Amish communities and you would see the women/girls sewing in the window either by hand or on an old treadle machine. Their customs forbad the use of electrical machinery. The quilt sheet would then often be quilted in a community quilting bee but I never got to see that in progress. Their clothes were always in dark colours - black, purple, burgundy, blue - so that influenced my choice of colours here. You would also often see them in their horse and carriage coming to get grocery basics. It must have been extremely cold in the winter as the breath of the horses sometimes made ice around their muzzles, Instead of the usual white/cream inners I used a bluish purple creating the pieced circles out of scraps but concentrating so that the small purple circles joined up creating a secondary pattern.

About the time I finished this quilt golden papers came on the market and I was keen to try them out. This was an early machine quilted piece using the golden papers with the rose stencil traced onto them. It seemed such a good idea but removing all the little bits of yellow tissue like paper at the end was not such a fun thing to do. Maybe my choice of stencil was too detailed. I hsven’t used the paper for quilting since but I have occasionally used the left over part of the roll for stitching through to make portraits or similar for embroidery

This quilt is machine pieces and machine quilted.