Plum Blossoms

I finished this quilt just in this nick of time for the Modern Quilt Guild contest. Literally. I emailed my entry in last night at about 10:30. Woops. 

It was a big push this week to get the quilt finished. 

On Tuesday, yes Tuesday, I still hadn't finished the backing. I had to get on that. Remember that this was my vision?  

(Ironing this was one of the LEAST FUN ironings I have ever been involved in, no lie.)

(There is the entire back. I LOVE IT.)

Now, onto the basting. This is usually my absolute least favorite part, but, now that I am a spray baster it couldn't be easier! I really cannot say enough about spray basting. Once you learn the quirks and what not to do, it really is awesome. It probably took me 1/2 hour to baste this whole thing. It is too bad that basting spray is expensive. The total for this quilt probably cost me $14 (including 40% off coupons at Joann's of course).

Time to get ready for quilting! I had a vision. See the plum colored fabric... I wanted to quilt a straight-line spiral all the way around the plum color. I had no idea which thread color to use. The fabric colors vary so much, that I didn't know what would work best.

 
Given how much purple there is in the quilt, I think that the purple wins. Also, give how much yellow there is on the back, I used a great yellow variegated thread for the backing.

 (Getting the quilt folded and ready to go under the machine)

Can anyone tell me what is wrong with the picture above? 

This is where the problems started. It took me 45 minutes to make the first "spiral" around the quilt and the entire time it was mostly miserable. Because of the size of the quilt, I was continually turning the quilt and sometimes, as shown above, I had THE ENTIRE quilt going through the neck of my machine. IT WAS MISERABLE. And, I thought that I was going to destroy my machine. I was literally shoving the quilt through and pulling and tugging on it. It wasn't good. I got halfway through the second "spiral" and called it quilts. This was not going to work. Especially not when I only had 2 days to complete it.

I had riiiiiiiiiiiiiippppppppppppppppppppppppppppp all of those stitches out. Thank you to Conan for keeping me awake.

Ok. On to quilting plan No. 2. Motif quilting. I decided to trace the center flower and quilt that all over the entire quilt.

Then I had to practice. See... I am not good at free motion quilting. Not good at all. I am certainly better at it now though!
 

Now that I had the pattern "down" I chalked up the pattern over the quilt. Because the flower motif is about 15x15, I could only work by chalking up 2 or 3 flowers at a time, because I knew that the chalk would wear off too quickly. I did intentionally start and stop off the top and on the batting instead so that there wasn't any stopping and starting visible on the quilt. The whole quilting wasn't TOO bad. But the motif was a little too big. I would never do one that big again, ever. I think something under 8 inches would be amazingly easy to work with. I still had to fight with this quilt a little bit to complete the flower.

This was the first full flower that I quilted, and you do not need to tell me how "rough" it looks. It looks quite bad. 

But, I did get a lot better!

 

Onto binding! I chose this fantastic solid that I used on both the quilt top and quilt back. 

 

 

 (For me, this is a very good machine quilting job.)

 (This one, not so much. At least I have learned to match the needle thread with the binding color, not with the quilt top color. It irritates me WAY MORE to have the thread show on the binding than on the quilt top.)

Plum Blossoms glamor shots...

 

My one small regret.... not hand quilting this center flower in time for the contest. How gorgeous would a wonderfully embellished focal point have been? 
 

 (Really Lauren, another cat picture?)

These are the pictures that I entered into the contest. Lighting in our house is SOOOO bad. You were allowed to enter 2 pictures, one of the entire quilt and another detail shot. Only 2 pictures! Brutal. 

 

 

Do you like the quilt? What do you think, do you think Denise Schmidt will pick me to win? Haha, a girl can dream. We shall see...... results of the contest will be available on October 15th. I won't have to wait all that long. 

Quilt Stats:

Fabric: Anna Maria Horner (obvi) Garden Party and bits of Good Folks. Also, I used gorgeous Kona Cotton solids.

Pattern: My own. One Big Log Cabin Block

Batting: Warm and White 100% cotton

Backing: More Garden Party and Kona Cotton solids used in the front

Size: Finished 75x75 square. It is a perfect size for snuggling. I already did it once today.

Be sure to check out my flickr account for all finished projects. Actually, this quilt knocks SEVERAL items off my Bucket List. It takes care of the following:

• Chomping into the Anna Maria Horner fabrics that I have been hoarding and was previously too scared to use
• Quilt a motif pattern over an entire quilt
• Quilt using variegated threads

In case you are new to the blog, I have a lot of things I want to do. I am that person that looks at something and says.. "oh I can make that". I have been saying that for years and compiled a wicked bucket list. I am making some headway though, thankfully.

Phew, long post!

Holler 

Remember this quilt?

Ok. So do you remember this quilt that I started a while back? Well, I jumped right back into quilting this baby once I learned of this contest that the Modern Quilt Guild is throwing (having? hosting? launching?). 

The general gist of the rules:

1) A quilt design completely made by you (can be inspired by other things though)

2) Has to be quilted 100% by you (no sending it out to get quilted)

There will be 3 winners. Each winner gets quite a few different prize packages. Kona Cotton Fabrics. Aurifil thread. Entry into a drawing for a new Janome quilting machine. Lots of goodies.

I am not sure that I can be classified as a modern quilter or not. I am not sure what a modern quilter really is. I mean, quilting is like ancient right? My quilt pattern is essentially one big log cabin block, which is pretty much as traditional as it gets.

Anyway, I finished the quilt top back in May. Time for the backing. When I decided to enter it into a contest, I knew that I had to give the backing more thought. I bought a few yards of the print below. It is in the front of the quilt as well. It is from Anna Maria Horner's Garden Party collection (where most of the fabric comes from for this quilt). 

I also got to use my pinking rotary cutter. Well, my rotary cutter with the pinking blade. For some reason, I always thought that by using the pinking blade I would mess up my seam allowance somehow. But it doesn't. 

I hope that its not too hard to picture, but this is what I envision for the quilt back. So each of the yellow AMH print strips will be 10.5 inches wide x the length of the quilt (75 inches). The combination of all the colored strips sandwiched in between are 6.25 inches. Given that, the combo below will be repeated 4 times. I think it will look really good! 

Of course, that meant I had to cut 1.25 inch strips .... weeeee! that was fun! (not).

What do you think?? Can you envision? Do you think that the back flatters the quilt top?

Ok. Back to quilting. I have about 15 days to get this baby done. 

Any quilting suggestions? Any and all are appreciated. 

Holler. 

Garden Party Quilt Top

I have completely fallen in love with this quilt. I am sure that no one could really understand what I was trying to explain in my last email about it, but this is my modern take on a traditional log cabin quilt with larger scale prints.


The center block is 15 x15 and therefore each piece is 15 inches wide x some increment of 15. Overall, the top is 60x60inches. I think that this will be a great lap quilt. Just looking at this picture right now I realized I messed up the placement of 2 strips. Bahhhh! Definitely NOT taking that apart.

Some action shots for you...
 

Finished with the top! Do you love it as much as I do???

Does anyone have any quilting suggestions? I am not really sure what I should do. Maybe I should stipple the eggplant with purple-ish thread. Then, maybe do some type of straight-line quilting for the patterned pieces. Hmmm......
 

xoxo