Alice's Comfort Quilt: My Yellow Reading Chair

Take one comfortable easy chair, a mug of tea, a good book, and a quilted throw to cuddle under.  That spells comfort for me, and I’ve needed much comforting for the past 21 months.  After a day of quilting, you can find me around 4:00 PM in this yellow chair in our living room.

To construct the chair, I took a photo of it, posterized it on Photoshop, traced the printed image onto freezer paper for a template, and then cut it out from a pale yellow batik.  I added the details and shadows with Fabric Fun Pastel Dye Sticks by Pentel*. I made a mini “quilt” from fabric printed with squares to place on one of the arms of the chair. I tried trapunto for the first time to make the chair look as comfy as it is.

For the mug I chose a print from my blue and white collection that best mimicked my Spode mugs.  I scanned the fabric, reduced the image on Photoshop, and printed it onto white fabric, and then sketched onto the white fabric the inside of the mug and its handle.

For the stack of books, I took a photograph of a little ceramic box that sits beside my reading chair.  I re-sized the photo and printed it onto some freezer-paper-backed fabric.  I confess that for some reason, portraying the  books was the biggest challenge for me in this quilt!  I tried several ways to handle the books, but each had problems.   The next to last method was to take a photo of a book written by my aunt. This photo printed onto fabric looked great, but it somehow didn’t work in the composition.   

All elements of the quilt were fused and then appliquéd to the red background, which I had first free-motion quilted in a random pattern before adding any appliqués.  Because of the trapunto, I included Timtex between the batting and backing of this quilt, to give it more stability.  The mini quilt is simply tacked on, also for dimensionality. 

The quilt’s backing is a commercial book print that I love. I fused onto the back the image of my aunt’s book and I also included a little mock mini quilt that turned out to be too big to work on the front. I bound the 12x12 quilt by fusing on strips of the red background batik.

*the product whose name I was trying to remember in Houston, when discussing my other chair quilt—“Vincent’s Chair”!

I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to capture the dimensionality of the chair
and the mini quilt in this close-up. Too, I wanted to show my rather inexpert
free-motion quilting, which done with red thread on the
red background thankfully doesn't show up very much
in the image of the entire quilt!

The back of my Yellow Chair quilt.  The name of my aunt's (Martha Cheavens) book is SPUN BY AN ANGEL,
set in the Mexico of her childhood (my father's parents were missionaries),
and it recounts the story of the death of one of the sisters.  The little boy in the book
is based on my father.  Needless to say, I treasure this now out-of-print book.