Mother-daughter improvisation

This morning my three year old daughter asked if she could make a quilt. We went downstairs where I gave her a 10 x 15" piece of white cotton fabric and a small box of hand-dyed cotton scraps. She spent about twenty minutes with them and came up with this vibrant collage.

While I quilted, she monitored the work closely from a perch on the table next to my sewing machine and periodically requested a change in the thread colour which she selected from my box of threads. She favoured the neon pinks and oranges, though I managed to convince her to choose some nice variegated cotton hand-dyed threads as well. I have quite a collection of these, made by Linda Palaisy. Linda's 100% cotton hand-dyed threads have beautiful saturated colour and are a dream to quilt with.

I played around with some different free motion stitches including a stipple done on the zig-zag setting. I think I read about this in Libby Lehman's book Threadplay. I'm not real pleased with the bottom half, but it was fun to play around on something that I wasn't scared to death to ruin. I think I'll do more of these smaller pieces and practice lots of free-motion machine work and see where it takes me.

Textile collage Hand-dyed and commercial cottons Free-motion machine quilted, 10 x 15"

Detail