I attempted picture quilts #2 and #3 at about the same time, in the fall and winter of 2022-2023. The second one I started was the first one I finished, and vice versa. The national park quilt started with a panel map of the United States with all of the national parks on it, along with miniature versions of all of the traditional national park posters. It was…not at all my colors. The brown was overwhelming; normally, I go for much brighter colors. Sure, the poster included many other colors, but the brown was definitely the color to contend with.
To make it palatable for my more colorful sensibilities, I had the idea to add some of my own pictures from the parks that I’d been in – 15 of them, at the time. Choosing the photographs was, again, rather difficult – from the hundreds of pictures I’d taken in the parks, how was I ever going to choose?! I did finally narrow them down to about 20 or so, for the 16 spaces I would need. So I had those 20 printed.
This time, I didn’t bother with my own printer; Spoonflower printed them for me. I was able to upload my own images into Spoonflower’s designer and print four images out on each of five fat quarters of otherwise white quilter’s cotton. Spoonflower’s printing is excellent – certainly far better than I could ever do at home! – and given the amount of printing I had to do and what the printable fabric and ink would have cost me, a far cheaper option than doing it on my trusty HP printer. I have not printed anything out at home since.
The final quilt is 60” high and 72” wide – the panel in the middle, with an inner border, surrounded by my images of the parks. The images have sashing to make them a consistent size – in this case, 12” x 12”. With the sashing, I was able to include green, which balanced the brown of the panel. The quilting is simply stitch-in-the-ditch around the images, with ties in the panel map in the middle marking the parks I’ve been to. It’s nothing spectacular, but I was really happy to be able to do something with my own pictures that wasn’t just matting and framing them and putting them on a wall. In a way, the green sashing is the fabric equivalent of a paper mat, but the finished quilt has a much bigger story to tell than any single 8” x 10” picture ever could.
