Here it is: the Mother of all UFOs. I started this mosaic-applique quilt in January 2005 and worked on it for a few months before abandoning it for two not-quite-so-ambitious quilts I finished last year. You probably cannot tell what it is going to be. It is actually from a photo of my daughter on the carousel at Disneyland when she was probably 3 years old. (You can see her clothes-the shirt is red, the pants a print, socks and shoes in yellow and light blue. Around her in various colors are saddle, harness, etc. The rolling green stripes are part of the background. The column on the right is the center of the carousel.)

The background is 48″ square and the mosaics average 1/2 inch, some a little smaller, some larger. They are fused on, then zig-zagged down in two shades of decorative thread with the machine. I used one of those blue washout pens to mark the background, which has for the most part disappeared, so I basically will have to go by sketches and a blown-up print of the original photo. Because of all the handling it gets, I can’t fuse too many mosaics down at once or they will start to lift off before they are sewn in place. That’s OK though, because it makes them easier to remove if I want to change some of them around. Last year I kept a notebook of the running total of mosaics used and even calculated an estimate of how many pieces the finished quilt would have (I think it was in the thousands). If I want to know in the end, I’d better find it or count them over again before I start adding more again.

Since I would like to finish the carousel quilt before my daughter graduates from college (she starts kindergarten in July) I am going public with my declaration to work on this quilt each and every Monday–Mondays are now officially to be known as “Mosaic Monday.” I will keep you updated monthly with my progress, large or small. And sometimes the progress is very small indeed. I would often work on it for hours at a stretch, and in the end, the quilt did not look much different than when I started. I can imagine how much less would be done if I had decided to hand applique the mosaics down.

In the April 2005 issue of QNM on page 10 there is a mosaic-applique quilt “Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, Where Have You Been” by Lorraine Carthew, which won the viewers’ choice award for wall quilts at the 2004 AQS show in Paducah. I heard somewhere later that she did her mosaics by hand. It is simply amazing, and the fact that it is hand appliqued makes it all the more!

I, on the other hand, made a conscious decision from the start to not try to hide my stitches, rather to integrate them into the design (You can see the light and dark thread on the yellow and lavender pieces on the detail above). Although I have since learned to do hand applique quite well, I definitely do not regret my choice of machine applique for this one. I know my own patience level, and do not fool myself on whether or not I will actually ever finish a project. It may take years, but someday I will finish this one!