Praise Hands for Sacred Threads 2009

"Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God, the Father, for everything." Eph 5:19,20


I have a habit of emailing quilters if their work really strikes me. This is how I got to know a new friend, Lisa Ellis last summer. I loved a lily quilt that she made and posted. Looking over her body of work I could see many similarities with mine. We both like to use Christian themes, women in motion and organic lines. She suggested that I enter the Sacred Threads Quilt Show. I put it on my list of things to do since I had seen articles on how amazing the show was. That said, life happens and the deadline for the show snuck up on me. So a week before they were due, I started designing. I had 3 or 4 designs drawn out and chose the one that I thought was the strongest. I had gotten inspiration from an online photo - which I blew up and cropped (twice). Then I drew in my own elements adding value with pencil.

I picked a pallet of primary colors (adding a bit of the complementary for accent). I pieced the background using fabrics not only from my stash but also my scrap bags. Ever since I color sorted my scraps, they are far more useful. With the background safely done, I created a pattern for the praise ribbons that would rise from the hands. I imagine them to gradate in different values of yellow, orange, and red. Still I was a little stumped on how to do that until I decided to paper piece them right onto the pattern. I machine rough edged the praise elements onto the background - which created a nice hard element of line - then added a ton of machine quilting. I don't think I ever added so much free motion thread work before in a piece.
I sewed every free moment I had that week. It took just over 40 hours to make the quilt but I was really happy with the final result since its what I had seen in my minds eye. Lisa is Sacred Threads Web Master and she cleverly had set up an online entry system which is wonderful. I got my entry in with only 4 hours to spare. I was thrilled! The only thing that topped that excitement was when I received the envelope 10 weeks later saying that it was accepted - my first national show.