Normally when a supplier sends us a catalogue showcasing the next seasons wares, we get a PDF that we look through on our laptop. This makes the days when the catalogues from Tender even more special! William Kroll of Tender always send us a box containing a printed catalogue and fabric samples of the entire collection. Flipping through them is always an intriguing experience, since the style of the fabrics and the natural dyes used are really special. As you might understand this is an irresistible gift for us texile nerds!
The first time I saw the box of samples I thought instantly that these fabric samples are to good to just throw away, and as I love making quilts I started to think of ways to combine the samples into one. This was some time ago, and one more box with samples arrived before I had the time to make the dream a reality. That was just as good, as it got me more material to work with!
The finished quilt is made of two seasons worth of fabric samples combined with leftover scraps from our indigo dyeing projects. Inside the quilt these's a layer of ecologic cotton batting that adds warmth and a pleasant heaviness and the front of the quilt is sewn on a sewing machine, the quilting is done by hand.
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The quilt is made of pieces of cotton seersucker, washed chambrays, hand-woven linen towels and even William's denim samples. The needle of my small domestic-use sewing machine kept breaking, so I had to use our big walking foot sewing machine to get through all layers!
This pattern is called "Flying geese", because it looks like rows of geese flying in the sky. Some of the scraps that came out of out stash had embroidery on them, which I think added nice details.
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The backside is made of thrifted hand woven linen towels that we have dyed with indigo. In Sweden these towels can be found in abundance at the charity shops and they usually have the monograms of the previous owners embroidered on them. As I was sewing the towels together I saw that these ones were marked "K D" and "T", which seems very fitting since those are the initials of me and Douglas and the first letter in Tender.
The quilting, ie. the seams that join the layers of fabric together and run along the length of the entire quilt, is sewn in a "prick stitch", which means that the stitches form tiny loops that look like dots on the front of the fabric, and longer stitches show on the back. I used a mercerized cotton thread that has a nice thickness to it, which makes the stitches a little more visible as opposed to regular sewing thread.
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When the quilt was done I decided there was really no way I could justify bringing one more quilt into our home (we already have three) so I thought that maybe it would be a nice thing to send it to William! After all, these are the fabrics he worked hard developing and surely they mean a lot to him. I embroidered the Tender logo on one of the corners and sent it to him and it arrived early this week. He sent us a reply letting us know that he was very happy about it. You kan see what he wrote on Superfuture Here, and he also posted some photos where the colors show a little better!
Så himla fint!
Its beautiful…..I really really want one!
Deep warm quilt made from Vegtable and botanical dyed fabric.
Its like something that poped out of fairy tail.
It’s just wonderful!