Alice's "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" Quilt: Take Your Pick, Mary Poppins!

Of course the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” makes me immediately think of Mary Poppins and the wonderful film by that name, starring the multi-talented Julie Andrews.  But my history with Mary Poppins goes back further than 1964, when the movie came out.  As a child, I was as voracious a reader as I am now.  I adored all of the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers and read them all, some of them several times.

Pondering our theme word and what sort of quilt to design, the image that stubbornly kept popping into my head was that of Mary Poppins floating down from the sky, holding onto an umbrella.  That image would not go away, and rather than fighting it, I decided to feature umbrellas.  What about a collection of colorful umbrellas?  Sort of an umbrellas collage?

I had a piece of hand-painted fabric created before this group started.  I had sprinkled the pale blue-gray with rock salt, just to see what happened as it dried in the sun.  The salt left marks that reminded me of raindrops, so luckily, I found this fabric in my stash, and that became the background.

I wanted one umbrella to be portrayed in a bird’s eye view, so it was the one I cut out first from fabrics to which I had applied Wonder Under.  The other four were then cut out, and eventually I arranged them all on the raindrop background.  Buttons from the collection I bought once at a junk store are used for the knobs on the top of the umbrellas.

I quilted this, in part, by echo quilting around each shape.  I appliqued the various sections of the umbrellas down with a variety of stitches, which did double-duty for more quilting and for securing the umbrellas.   I fused the binding down around this 12”x12” quilt.  I couldn’t come up with a name for a long time, but finally settled on “Take Your Pick, Mary Poppins!”