Blogger’s Quilt Festival – Fall 2010 edition

Finally, a new blog post! I think I fell out of love with my previous blog design (to be fair, I had been using it for a good year). So, as I wanted to participate in the fun of the Blogger’s Quilt Festival, I had to do something about it. I LOVE my new design and I hope this will motivate me to blog more.
But let’s move on to the subject of the day:

I haven’t done a lot of quilting in the last few months, as I didn’t want to start anything big until I had finished one of my first projects (I have only been quilting for less than a year!). It took me a long time to finish this project, as I was handquilting it, and our summer has been relatively warm – too warm to be buried under a quilt! But, as the weather cooled down, I have finally been able to finish it last week. I was so pleased with myself and I have been admiring it (and petting it, too) since.

Somewhere over the rainbow

This quilt is my ‘own’ pattern. I was of course inspired by all the layered quilts around, but all the numbers, etc were figured by me. It started its life on graph paper, with a few coloured pencils and a calculator. So it feels incredible to see it there, for real!
Some little stats about this project. It is about 44×52″, so it’s a good size lap blanket. Each ‘block’ use only 2 strips of printed fabrics and 2 strips of solid fabric (though, I’ve been less economical with the solid fabric). The prints are all from a jelly roll of Boutique by Chez Moi for Moda and the solid strips are from a jelly roll of the Bella Solids (Moda fabrics too) in the natural colourway (it’s got a lovely creamy tint).

The binding was made with 6 strips from the same Boutique roll (I used the tiny dots).

The back is using the paisley print from the same Boutique line. My husband chose the colours. I wasn’t too sure about this choice at first, but now, I’m loving this blue and orange. The contrasting strip has been made with remnants of the front and I embroidered my name and the date the quilt was put together. I love the back almost as much as the front!

The quilting was entirely done by hand. It required me to draw the shapes and then handquilt, as I had decided for these organic flowery shapes to contrast with the squareness of the patchwork. It is also reminiscent of the drawings I used to do when I was a child. I used a variegated thread which had yellow, cream, green and purple. I’m not the best hand quilter around, far from it. And it was rather painfully slow going. But I LOVE the result. Though I’m not sure I’d handquilt something of this size anytime soon.

With the leftover strips, I made a matching cushion cover. My first ever cushion cover and my first machine quilting. I absolutely adore it.

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