Mermaid Haiku - Project Quilting

"Mermaid Haiku," 21" x 18", made for Project Quilting, Season 6, Challenge 5: My Favorite Fabric, Mar. 2015 in Yellow Springs, Ohio

Challenge recap for  "My Favorite Fabric":

Use your favorite fabric (the one that's too pretty to cut). You can add as many other fabrics as you'd like, but since this one is your favorite, it should be easily recognized in your completed project. Be sure to include a photo of the fabric.

OK, this was a tough one. Not making the quilt but picking a favorite fabric, since I have so many beautiful hand dyed and batik fabrics, in addition to commercial prints. I decided the spirit of this challenge was to use the fabric that you don't want to cut, that you just want to save forever.

I haven't had difficulty using my favorite hand dyed or batik fabrics, but when I searched through my stash (and yes, I had to look through all of it!) I did find several commercial prints that fit the category of "too pretty to cut." I noticed that most of these pieces were large scale prints, which I don't tend to use a lot.

Going by instinct, I chose this piece of fabric. It has a blue background and what looks like ocean waves, only the waves are a variegated green, pink, and purple. I couldn't decide on a way to cut it or what do do after I cut it, so I thought about what it could be if it was just the background for something else, which led to the mermaid idea.

The fabric was slightly larger than half a yard (20" x 42") and I decided to use half of it, so while I did not cut it into pieces, I DID cut it. I made my quilt sandwich and couched some gray hand-spun yarn with bits of silver in it horizontally across the fabric, following the shape of the waves.

I found a piece of hand dyed fabric for her upper body drew her face on with a permanent marker and raw-edge machine appliqued it to the background.

Then I created the tail like I make my fabric mosaics: small pieces of green fabric arranged in the form of a tail and covered with green netting. I made the tail as a separate piece and wrapped the netting around it then appliqued it to the background. I also quilted the scales with a dark green thread.

I couched three different yarn vertically to represent ocean plants and couched white hand-spun yarn also with silver accents as her hair. I gave it a knife-edge binding and couched some thinner white hand-spun yarn around the edge to act as a border.

The final touches were adding some pearl-white buttons.

I only have part of the text on the selvedge and it reads "Haiku styled by Deborah Co" and there it cuts off. So I named my quilt "Mermaid Haiku" and wrote this:

"Peaceful mermaid floats

amid the fish and sea shells

bliss beneath the waves."

More about Mermaid Haiku

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 Click on any of the photos to see larger images.

To read more about Project Quilting, go here.

To see other entries for this challenge, visit the My Favorite Fabric link up.