Designed and made by: Beckey Prior
Quilted by: Me Jackie Brown
This quilt won first place in mixed techniques at the Dallas Quilt Show 2024.
Every time Becky Prior brings me a quilt, I know I am going to be blown away. This quilt was no exception! Beckey's quilts really challenge me to think of the story within the quilt. They challenge me to come up with new quilting techniques to help enhance the story.
This quilt tells a story and I felt obligated to enhance the story in any way that I could through quilting.
We collaborated on this quilt. She had some ideas of how she wanted it quilted. This quilt is representing an old photo. You can see where Beckey added “tears” as if the photo is old and torn. I had to get creative with the tears to make sure they did not poof out.
The brown fabric around the dark fabric was frayed, so I had to so carefully stitch around that!
You can see so many different things in this quilt depending on the lighting! It is so full of surprises! You can look at it one time, then see many other things next time!
And if you ever get to see the back… you will be amazed!
My favorite part of the quilting is the clock. This is tea time of course so we must have a clock! I designed the clock and then stitched it out. I had to go into the clock to add rays and microstippling to make the numbers really show. I put 3:30 on the clock which I understand that tea time is 4:30. Oops, they are late, they are late… to a very important date!
Let’s talk about the table cloth! I just used a curved echo stitch to give the appearance of a flowing table cloth hanging on a round table. When Becky does appliqué, it really looks 3 dimensional. My goal is to enhance this 3 dimensional appearance with my stitching.
I just stitched in the ditch on the Flamingo with a touch of echoing. This was enough to bring him to life!
Beckey pieced the border with tea pots, diamonds and hearts. Stitch in the ditch, echoing, and stippling in the border to keep it simple.
If you are familiar with this story, you will get the hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds randomly floating in the background. Pebbles and microstippling were added to make these items appear as if they are coming out at you.
Stitching on the characters faces and clothing, they seemed to come to life for me.
We needed a chess set so I free handed the chess board that Alice is stepping on. Yes, the different squares of the chess board are stitched out using a grid. Every other square is a stitched matchstick design! That was tedious but it was really worth the effort for the result!
You have to look closely, but just below that you will see the fallen chess pieces! King, Queen, Knight, Rook, Bishop, and Pawns falling off the chess board. These are all in the brown border.
Last but not least, you must have tea cups at a tea party! So you can see on both sides of the photo there are tea cups falling! It is as if every viewer of this quilt is offered a cup of tea and an invitation to the tea party!
