Patchwork Wishes

Patchwork Wishes was supposed to be  Friday Finish reveal, but I kept forgetting to post it on a Friday, so it's just going to be a "any-day-of-the-week but it's finished" post.   

Don't you love a professional (ahem) photo with feet and dog's tail? 
Patchwork Wishes by Canuck Quilter Designs

I shared the start of this quilt back in January, showing off the package of precut squares I used to acheive a coordinated scrappy look with less effort than digging through scrap bins. Though I posted a few brief updates on Instagram and Facebook, I neglected to share here on the blog.  I gave you a peek in my post about binding choices earlier this month, but I think Patchwork Wishes deserves its own post.

The piecing went relatively quickly and I had a Rosie-approved finished top by the middle of January.  

The nine-patch cornerstone blocks are strip-pieced, which reduces the amount of cutting and makes assembly much faster.  Of course the star points are my favourite stitch-and-flip (AKA lost corners) star points that can't be accidentally blunted.  I think the most time-consuming part of this quilt was moving the sashing strips around until I liked the distribution.  I tried to let it be random, but my brain just wasn't having it.

I started quilting it a month later.  That's actually a rather quick start for me.  Quilts I send out to a longarmer get finished promptly, but when I plan to quilt the quilt myself it can languish for a while.  There's a stack of tops growing on my shelves, some of them several years old.  

Repositioning the quilt to continue quilting after running out of bobbin thread

Moving right along...Patchwork Wishes got a quicker start.  As some of you might know, I'm a big fan of my walking foot.  That's what I started with.  I stitched in the ditch in all the seams in the sashing.  That was an easy job.  Tedious, but easy.  Stitching all the way down the quilt multiple times and across the quilt as well was not the most stimulating activity, but audiobooks kept me entertained.

Stitching in the ditch is tedious, but it's a little bit like tracing the outlines of a shape before filling in the middle when you're colouring in a colouring book.  It think it defines the shape and makes things crisper. I love the slightly puffy texture it raised in the sashing of this quilt.  It just screams "I'm a cozy quilt, come curl up" to me.

I also wanted to stitch in the ditch around the stars.  I hoped to use freemotion quilting rulers for that so I wouldn't have to turn the quilt or break thread several times to avoid turning.  However, my sewing machine misbehaves when I ruler quilt, lifting the presser foot up randomly and making me risk a needle in a finger.  It's been in the shop many times but the technician can't figure out what's up, so I've given up on the ruler quilting for now.

In the end, I used the walking foot and just turned the quilt.  It's just small enough to not have required too much effort to smoosh through the throat of the machine at each turn.  I extended the lines through the center of the star for a little added interest and slightly denser quilting.  I was surprised to find I was able to quilt the whole star without breaking thread.

Once all the ditch stitching was finished, I wanted a bit more stitching in the block backgrounds to add more visual interest as well as to even out the quilting density.  I used a hera marker to audition lines where I thought I'd stitch.  The indentation left by the hera marker gives me a better idea of the texture the quilting will add than a drawn line does.  

I quilted all these short lines in long passes, stitching a line, securing stitching with very short stitches at the beginning and ending of each line but not breaking thread, then moving on to the next line in the same direction, all across the quilt.   I went back after and snipped away the thread between the stitched parts.  This was faster than having to pull the bottom thread up from the back at the beginning of each line.

So far so good.  I was thrilled with the texture and subtle detail in the background.

That's where I stopped in very early March.  I just had the border left to quilt, but I could not decide what to do.  Should I try to freemotion a string of stars?  Hold off in the hopes my backup machine could be made to love ruler work again? I considered using the walking foot to quilt a beadboard/piano key design like the one I quilted on Quilter's Scrapbook 15 years ago, but that seeemed really, really tedious.  

What's a quilter to do?  Go work on something else of course.  Feverish sewing to complete four new quilts for upcoming fabric collections ensued. (Can't wait to show you those in December!)

I came back to Patchwork Wishes in late June, settling on gentle cable that I could quilt with the walking foot.  I've had the stencil for years, dating back to my hand quilting days.  I think it's funny I never actually used this particular stencil on a hand quilted quilt but have now used it on three machine quilted quilts.

I did drag my feet for a couple of weeks about marking the border design, convinced it would take forever to adjust the stencil placement to fit just right and that figuring out how to turn the corner would be a pain.  I guess I either forgot it went smoothly the first two times I marked this on a quilt, or it just went more smoothly because I"d done it before.  In any case, once I stopped dragging my feet and complaining, I marked the border in one evening and quilted it in four easy passes around the quilt over the course of two leisurely evenings.

I hadn't planned ahead for the binding and I'm lucky there was still a bit of the border fabric left on the bolt when I went back to the quilt shop.  I suppose I would have found something else to use, but I think the matching binding was perfect for this quilt.

Rosie approves :)

At 56" x 67", it's a lovely size for a throw.  I'm looking forward to curling up under it with a good book when the weather coold down. 

If you have a layer cake (or non-Moda equivalent stack of 10" precuts) waiting for the perfect quilt, Patchwork Wishes might be the one.  I really think this design would work with all sorts of fabric styles.  You can find the pattern as a PDF download in my shop or you can ask for it at your favourite quilt shop.

Time to go rustle up some supper.  Hubby is away this week and cooking for one is boring.  Bread and cheese and an assortment of fruit sounds like an easy summer supper...

Happy quilting,

Joanne