A Scrapbook Style Quilt

Kathryn, one of the regular students at Utopia, is making a coming-of-age quilt for her good friend's daughter, Teagan.

Starting with photographs of Teagan featuring her as a babe in arms right up until now, we scanned them and then printed them onto specialty printer fabric.

Kathryn began to frame them ready for a scrapbook style quilt, using various coloured fabrics picked from the colours in the pictures.

She chose a wonderful bright batik fabric with purple ferns on an orangey-red background and a matching spotted fabric for the main quilt fabrics.

Scrapbook journal

In scrapbooking, you add some journalling which tells the story of the pictures on the page, so Kathryn wrote a journal which I printed for her onto fabric.

Irregular (random set) quilt layout

Because the quilt evolved as she worked, Kathryn added and subtracted filler strips in the spot fabric, until she had a group of photos in a larger piece, being careful not to have the pictures lined up in rows. The reason for that was that they are various sizes and needed to be scattered to distract from this.

Almost completed quilt

All the photos are framed, joined into strips with one another and joined to the centre block, which is an extreme close-up of Teagan's face inserted into a skewed frame of orange for the focal point.

To complete the quilt, Kathryn is going to add borders in the fern batik, with scrap nine patch blocks in the corners.