Teddy's Palindrome

The theme for this year's Michigan Quilt Artist Invitational is "South of the Border." A group of quilters were invited to make 20"x24" art quilts featuring Mexico, South America or Central America. I chose Panama and decided to make an art quilt that looked like a postcard from Panama.

Starting this project, I pretty much knew only three things about Panama: the Panama Canal, Panama Red (immortalized in song by New Riders of the Purple Sage), and "a big Panama with a purple hat band." So my plan was to incorporate these three into my Panama postcard quilt.

I started out sketching my idea with pencil and paper.


Next step, I constructed the locks of the Panama Canal.


Then I added some purple hat bands.


Next I fused on the letters of Teddy's Palindrome, choosing a red fabric for PANAMA. I also fused on a couple macaws to make the postcard a little more festive.

The next step will be to stitch around the fused letters and birds to anchor them down a little better. The Invitational quilts travel to exhibits for two years, and they experience a lot of "wear and tear" in their travel, so fusing alone might not hold up. The final steps will be to machine-quilt and bind the quilt before sending it to Flint in July.