Now Showing: "Heart Mania"

Since I'm hopelessly unoriginal at naming quilts I'm warming to the idea of having the recipient name their quilt.  It worked for my husband's quilt.  My daughter came up with "Heart Mania" for her quilt.  Here it is, finally!

 The 6" heart blocks are the "Heartfelt" paper piecing pattern by Cindi Edgerton. The setting, with 3" borders on two sides of each block, is mine. The cable quilting motif in the middle part of the quilt is "Avalon" from Quiltmaker's "Quilting Motifs Volume 1". The motif on the outside border is mine.

I finished sewing the binding to the back around 1 am on Tuesday.  I should have stopped earlier and finished on Wednesday, but I was so close to being done it was hard to quit.   It was even harder to get up on time and get the kids' lunches packed and everyone off to school on time in the morning!   However I got an "extra squeezy" hug from my daughter after she woke up and found herself tucked under her new quilt, so it was worth it.

On Monday night as I was attaching the binding I was pondering how astounding it was that a 26" square of fabric produced enough bias binding to go around the whole quilt.  I use the bias tube method to make binding.  I have a lovely laminated "cheat sheet" (Quilter's Strip Ticket from Lamb Art Press) with instructions and diagrams on one side and charts listing what size square of fabric I need start with to make various lengths of various widths.  I love that cheat sheet and was rather dismayed when it failed me this time!  Three quarters of the way around the quilt I realized the binding strip would be about 20 inches too short.

It turns out that the chart only works when you put in the right numbers at the beginning...go figure!   I got exactly as many inches of binding out of my 26" square as the chart said I would.  My quilt is 308" around, not the 288" that I looked up in the chart.  Luckily I had enough scrap left over to piece together an extra 20".

Now I'm off to ponder what I will make next.  I can play with other projects guilt-free now that "Heart Mania" is done and delivered.  I'm thinking about a Christmas zigzag table runner for my coffee table...

Almost made my deadline

I almost made my self-imposed deadline for finishing my daughter's quilt.  Of course, the deadline kept shifting, from the end of September, to the end of October, to the end of November.  I'm going to claim qualified success with that last one.  I finished quilting the last little bit of border this afternoon around 4:30 pm and today is the last day of November. :)

The quilt still has to be bound but I'm pressing the binding strip now and will have it sewn to the front by the time I head to bed.  I won't obsess and stay up till the wee hours to hand stitch it to the back, though it is tempting!  If all goes well I'll be able to spread it on her bed while she sleeps tomorrow night so she sees it the next morning.  December 1st is not too far of the mark!

Sorry, no pictures today.  I've got to run back to the ironing board!

Bloggers Quilt Festival in red and white

I was hoping to show my daughter's new quilt in this fall's Blogger's Quilt Festival. (Thank you for organising this Amy!)  The quilt was supposed to be done by the end of October, then by the end of this week...Well, I'm still stitching away at that one, so I'll share the quilt I made for my parents a few years ago.

This was the fourth quilt I made and was my very first attempt at making a quilt without a pattern.  Looking at it now there are things I would do differently to balance the design a bit more and to even out the density of quilting, but as a first design effort I think it is quite respectable.

The quilt started with the nine patches in the center.  They are the first blocks I pieced - ever.  This is where I learned that a small variation from a 1/4 inch seam results in a block that is not the size you expected.  I wasn't sure how to fit these into any pattern I had since they weren't a convenient 6 inches square, so I tucked them away in a box for 3 or 4 years.

With a bit more experience under my belt I pulled them out, stocked up on graph paper and coloured pencils and drew up a plan.  Initially I was  going to make a wall hanging, and the design stopped at the red border outside the flying geese border.  Then I decided I wanted to practice my hand quilting skills more and would need more quilt to do that on, so I added more.

Having added more quilt to quilt on, I needed to choose what motifs to quilt. By this time I had decided this quilt would be for my parents, so I selected various motifs that told their story. At this point I learned how to make my own templates. Some of the motifs are derived from free clipart. Others are resized from stotre-bought quilting templates that of course were larger or smaller than the spot I wanted to quilt them in.

 I sent my parents a picture of the finished quilt top that Christmas.  Mom was very appreciative.  She also didn't expect a finished quilt anytime soon.  Of course knowing she didn't expect it I made a point of finishing before we visited the following June :) 

Now, if I could just finish my daughter's quilt...  If any of you are following that progress, I have 3 blocks and 3/4 of the border left to quilt.  The end is in sight!  With time she has warmed up to the hearts in the border, too, so I guess it is taking me just long enough