Alice's Quotation Quilt: A Bookshelf Quilt

I suppose it’s no secret by this time, among my Material Mavens friends, that I love books and reading!  Off the top of my head, I can recall my “Comfort” quilt (favorite reading easy chair, mug of tea, stack of books, etc.) my “Translate” quilt (depicts the main character of my all-time favorite book) and recently, a quilt based on poet Robert Frost’s poem.  Perhaps there have been others that I don’t immediately call to mind, quilts that reveal this love that stands with quilting as my two favorite pastimes.  SO! I embraced this theme with great delight!  What quotation to choose among the hundreds of my most favorite authors?  

And then I chose a quotation from an author (Roald Dahl) who’s a favorite of one of my grandchildren and not me!  But the quotation is so delightful, and as soon as I found it, I knew what I’d construct:  a bookshelf quilt, with a shelf holding some of the favorite books from my childhood.   I put Dahl's quotation in a banner above the bookshelf.  (It reads: "So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV sets away. /  And in its place you can install/ A lovely bookshelf on the wall.)

That idea conjured up a happy memory of myself as a little girl:  Sitting on the floor in front of a shelf in the children’s section of the Austin Public Library.  I had just finished reading THE VOYAGES OF DOCTOR DOOLITTLE, and I was fascinated by the doctor and envied his ability to talk to animals.  When I discovered on the bottom shelf other books about the beloved doctor by author Hugh Lofting, I was as excited as I’d have found a buried treasure!

The books on my bookshelf quilt are pieced, not fused.  Once I had finished the piecing, for the titles I used again a technique I had used for my “Interwoven” quilt, printing onto ribbon.  I typed in different fonts just a few of my childhood favorites among the scores whose titles I well remember. Then using double-stick tape, I taped ribbons over the titles, and I ran this page through the printer again.  

Then I fused the ribbons with the titles down onto the books, using Wonder Under, and then I appliquéd them with a small buttonhole stitch.  I printed off the banner at the top of the quilt with the Roald Dahl quotation, and I appliquéd it, too.  The little blonde girl, who represents me as a child, was a coloring book image that I printed onto fabric, after coloring it with colored pencils. Then I fused it and stitched around it also.  This buttonhole and straight appliqué stitching sufficed for the quilting on my quilt.  I bound the quilt conventionally with red fabric, and the backing is a wonderful print of books that I have had for a long time.