I Never Had a Friend Like You

July 19, 2022

This is my newest book quilt, inspired by Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce. I loved this book! I actually listened to the audiobook and it has one of my favorite narrators, Juliet Stevenson, who also did Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I’ve copied the quilt label below so you can see what I said about it and how it relates to the book. If you’ve read the book you might remember that Marge and Enid change their appearances by the end of the book and this quilt portrays them near the end. If you haven’t read the book I’ll try not to leave spoilers, but reader beware!

I Never Had a Friend Like You
In the beginning of the book Margery feels drab, old and frumpy and is disdainful of ditzy Enid who is blond, bubbly and seems unfit for a tropical expedition to find the Golden Flower Beetle of New Caledonia. As time goes by these two women discover more about each other and realize they are both stronger than they thought. Due to various circumstances, by the end of the book Marge’s hair is bleached yellow and Enid’s hair returns to its original black. Marge discovers her body is strong and capable. Enid discovers she has the ability to survive and even thrive in the field despite difficult conditions.

I imagined Marge and Enid as the best friends that they become and as if they were posing for a selfie in the jungle. There are several little details that came straight from the book. They are surrounded by banana plants. Enid wears the blue feather mentioned in the book, Marge wears a man’s shirt covered with white orchids to represent the favored habitat of the golden beetle. She even has a couple of golden beetles crawling on her. Even though this scene never happened in the book, it is my favorite way to think of them during their happiest moments on the mountain while they did their beetle research. When I saw the SPAM fabric around this label, I knew I had to include it somehow. The title also comes from the book. It’s something that Enid and Marge said to each other during difficult times. I really loved this book and the depiction of these women with all their faults and strengths.

I knew I wanted to include the golden beetles in my quilt and thought about creating them with fabric, but a quick search proved that it was easy to find golden beetle charms so I went the quicker way. I love how they shine!

I wanted to talk about doing another face quilt because I’ve done a few by now and I did this one differently than before. In this case I cut the face shapes and neck shapes free hand from fabric that already had fusible applied. I laid them out on the background fabric (the perfect tropical jungle fabric made by Kaffe Fassett and called ‘ Green Banana Tree’). I marked all around the face and neck shapes with a heat erasable Frixion pen and then cut out the back ground fabric about 1/2” inside the line. Otherwise the background would show through. I did the same on the shirt fabrics.

At this point I layered the background fabric over some cotton batting, put the faces, necks and shirts in place and fused them to the background and batting all at once. Then I carried on adding the facial features and hair and fused them on too. Once all the fabric pieces were fused I layered it with the backing fabric (see the great beetle fabric for the backing below) and machine quilted it. I decided for this one to try to do minimal quilting on the faces, so they are only quilted on the edges of all the fabric shapes. In person it looks pretty good, though in the photos there’s a lot of wrinkles. It doesn’t really bother me. It’s hard to say if it’s better to have machine quilting lines all over a person’s skin or have it be a little rumply looking.

If you put the word ‘face’ in the search bar on the blog sidebar you can see a list of previous face quilts I’ve blogged about. I did these eyes differently with the pink eyelid above the eye and the large fabric eyelashes. These faces are a bit more cartoonish with those eyelashes. Also, I got a tip recently to use a black fabric with white spots for the iris so you don’t have to add a highlight and that worked great! I like looking for a small motif to use for the cheeks and I think these little flowers look cute.

Doing the hair is just about the best part of making a face quilt. I had so much fun with Enid’s hair. I got all those different black prints to add some depth and when I saw the roses on the black background I knew they’d be perfect for her. She was a very girly girl. For Marge I enjoyed doing the circular flower shapes to represent her hair which is bleached blond by the end of the book and a little bit unruly. I added the extra flower on the bottom right and the green one for a little pizzazz.

Another thing I wanted to try on this quilt was doing an open/smiling mouth. I really like how Enid’s smile came out. Marge’s a bit smaller, but she was more serious than Enid so I felt that fit her better. I also did two different noses. There are many ways to do a nose which you’ll see if you follow the link in the previous paragraph. Maybe it would be good to have a bit of a library for all the different ways to do facial features?

As far as the skin tones I wanted the necks to be a shade or two darker to denote the shadow. Other than that I just went with something that’s not too pink. If you’ve seen other face quilts you’d know that you can really do skin tones in any color and it will look amazing. I machine stitched my signature on the quilt. It’s been so long since I did that I forgot how I usually do it, so it’s not quite right, but that’s fine.

I’ve included a photo of the label here, because it’s the only place I could see adding the SPAM fabric. I would never normally buy SPAM fabric, but as I’ve been visiting fabric stores near me and looking for my favorites I happened upon Fabric Place Basement. They have quite a lot of premium quality quilting fabric, but it’s all closeouts and older stuff. Really good prices, just not the place to find the latest and greatest. In this case I did find a number of good basics, but when I ran across a fat quarter of SPAM fabric I debated for a little bit on whether to get it. I knew I’d only need a tiny amount, but in the end I’m so glad I got it. It is another great detail from the novel as Marge and Enid ate quite a lot of SPAM! I also love those great big beetles on the backing fabric. I got that one and Marge’s orchid shirt fabric from Spoonflower.

* A note about Spoonflower: This is only the second time I’ve ordered from them and I did so because I really wanted that beetle print. I first ordered years and years ago when Spoonflower was new. At that time I wasn’t all that impressed with the quality of the printing, but especially didn’t like the stiffness of the fabric. Fast forward all these years and I would say the quality of the printing has improved, but I’m still not happy with the stiff fabric. I ordered the Petal Signature Cotton which is supposed to be quilting weight, but I don’t like it. I’m not sure I’d order from them again even though they have some really amazing designers. The beetles are by Kate Rhees and she has a ton of other wonderful designs I’d love to have. I just wish she could design for one of the major quilt fabric companies.

So, this quilt measures 25” x 33” which isn’t big enough to display at the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show which requires a minimum size of 40” x 40”. Because of that the Undercover Quilters have decided to make things easier on ourselves and make smaller quilts that are mounted on a black quilt that is the required size. That meant that I had to create a black quilt (a soul sucking activity if ever there was one). I decided to get that out of the way first. In order to mount my quilt I used vintage buttons along the top of the quilt and a few in the bottom left corner and one in the bottom middle. I sewed through each button and the two quilts with white thread so they’d be easy to remove later. I left the right corner free in case anyone wants to read the quilt label. I’m kind of sad that my fabulous backing fabric won’t show, but at least I’ll know it’s there. I also don’t think my quilt looks all that great on a black background. I’ll be happy when it comes home next year and I can remove it. I’ll probably sew the buttons on to the Marge and Enid quilt for permanent display when it comes back and lives in my sewing room. The black quilt will be used year after year for all future UCQ book quilts.

The quilts from this book will debut at the Mt Bachelor Quilters’ Guild show on August 20, 10-4 in Pioneer Park in Bend, Oregon. Then they’ll be displayed at the Sisters show next July. I hope to be at Sisters next year to see them all in person.