My Sound of Music Quilt
Every year, my local quilt guild, the Clustered Spires Quilt Guild, hosts a challenge for members to create a quilt on a chosen theme. This year, the theme was “create a quilt that illustrates your favorite song.” It surprised me how challenging it was to come up with which song I wanted to use for my quilt! I’m a very musical person, I love so many songs, but I felt like Goldilocks trying to pick — some of the songs felt too personal to include, some felt too obscure - part of the fun of the reveal is that people will try to guess what song you illustrated, so I wanted something at least in the realm of something people might have heard of before.
As a child, the 1965 film The Sound of Music was a huge favorite of mine. I would watch it over and over, and I even named our first cat Liesl after one of my favorite characters. When I thought of using that as my reference point, it felt “just right” :) I did cheat just a little, because the quilt includes references to multiple songs from the film, not just the title song…
For the background, I chose a color that reminds me of the drapes Maria cuts up and sews into play clothes for the children. One of my favorite moments is a few of Maria’s favorite things…can you spot what they are?
Before making this quilt, I had no idea what Edelweiss flowers look like - they are quite big and beautiful! I tried to capture the cute little puff balls at the center of the flowers, they are pretty magical.
Other details include the cloud they can’t catch and pin down, the absurd little bird saying “cuckoo” and some of my favorite lyrics from do re mi. My absolute favorite part, though, is the goat puppets from the song The Lonely Goatherd
I love the puppets in the film, and stitching them on to the quilt was so much fun!!! They make me smile.
The hills are also a central part of the quilt, and I wrapped up the story by stitching 9 little people climbing every mountain. I wasn’t originally planning on it, but a last fun detail I added while quilting is a rainbow that the von Trapps are following, which led to me singing a rendition of Climb Every Mountain in the car on a trip with my family as I was finishing the quilt, which unfortunately was not particularly well received :)
Once I got past the hurdle of thinking of a song, this was easily my favorite challenge quilt I’ve made so far for any guild challenge. It felt very fun and playful, and feels very “me”!!