Graceful yellow flowers grow in front of a crocheted table mat, their brilliant color contrasting with the pale green fabrics of the quilt top. The flowers and the pretty filet crochet mat remind me of a time when more people took time to beautify their homes with handmade things and flowers fresh from the garden.
In Alice Walker’s book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, she writes about her mother, capturing the feeling perfectly:
Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms—sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena…and on and on.
The Story of Graceful Yellow
Normally I make flowers for a wall hanging, and true to habit, I crocheted a few yellow flowers for another project. They didn’t work out for that piece, so Graceful Yellow is the other way around: a wall hanging made for the flowers.
The crocheted table mat serving as a backdrop to the flowers has picot stitches around the edges. Picots are the decorative bumps or points. Picots are notorious for curling if you don’t sew them on just right. My favorite way to get picots to stay in their proper shape, is to sew each one down with a bead, which I did on Graceful Yellow. It also has a selection of buttons, representing the ground which the flowers are growing from, or maybe pebbles on the ground.
Graceful Yellow was finished in 2017. It began touring with the Celebrate Doilies art quilt exhibit early in 2018.
Techniques used in Graceful Yellow were patchwork, quilting, crochet, appliqué, and embellishment; using cotton fabrics, threads, and binding, vintage crocheted table mat doily, beads, and buttons.