Texas Tickertape

I wanted to show this to ya\’ll so badly but I wanted to finish it and actually get a couple of good pictures of it in the sun before I revealed this piece to the world.

You know those times that you think of an idea and HAVE to make it right then? Well I had one of those. I live in a loft with 18 ft ceilings and I finally got a large custom made art piece to put on one of the walls so that it didn\’t look like a massive void. But then the other 2 walls did. So I finally printed some of the pictures I\’ve taken from trips and hung them and it looked great, but then the last wall was bare and sad. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with that wall when the idea struck me.

I\’m a native Texas born and raised. I love Texas. And I just recently moved to Minnesota. It\’s different. Don\’t take it the wrong way, I\’m really enjoying it. But I thought that if I could incorporate a little piece of home into a piece that it would make sure I don\’t forget my roots type of thing. I was thinking of doing an off centered state of Texas and was trying to figure out what I wanted the Texas to be made of. I\’ve seen so many low/high volume pieces that I love but I didn\’t have enough low volume pieces to make it work. This baby needed some size. Then I started looking at scraps and remembered how much I love doing tickertape pieces. I have done two different pieces for swaps and never one for myself. Well I decided to change that.

I laid out a WOF x 5.5 ft piece of tan material and went about trying to replicate the shape of Texas. That is hard. It took me lots of tries but once I got the outline down I started on the actual tickertape. I knew I wanted to do a rainbow, just because my decor is bright and I love rainbows. You can\’t look at one without a smile crossing your face. I decided to start with a heart in the middle of Texas, where Austin is. My favorite city in the world. I then just got going with my glue stick and scissors. Until I ran out of my glue stick. This was a massive tickertape project. My other pieces were 2ft x 2ft max. This one was 4 ft x 5 ft and the pieces anywhere from .5 in to 1.75 in.

I had a friend bring over a large pack of gluesticks and I was able to finish it up that night. I proceeded with tacking down all the pieces. I started with a regular 1/4 in foot but quickly turned to the FMQ method due to all that turning. Worked well. Some were crooked but hey, I knew it was going to be on the wall and no one had that good of eyes so shush. Just get it done.

Once I finished tacking I was trying to figure out how I wanted to quilt it. I definitely wanted it to be more of a modern quilt, looking more like a piece of art than a quilt. So I opted for 1/4 in straight line quilting.

I got about half way done and then was done with straight line quilting for the day and it took me another week to finally finish it bit by bit. OMG so boring. See how close I was one night when I gave up?

Quilting Done. Phew. Binding. The background has more of a brown tone so I opted to go with a brown binding. I had a business trip at the beginning of last week so took it with me and finished up the binding in the hotel room.

I then had to wait for my tallest friend to get back from a work trip and then a camping trip to be able to hang it. Since my walls are so tall we had to put a ladder on top of a trunk and then have him hang it at the tallest point he could reach. It was the perfect height!

I absolutely love it. It\’s my favorite piece I\’ve ever done I think. Plus now everyone that comes over will know I\’m from Texas. 🙂