Wednesday, May 25, 2011

more wedding quilt pictures


I finished my friend's wedding quilt! I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.


I did straight line quilting with the walking foot, spacing the lines about an inch apart from one another and turning corners to emphasize the off-center cross shape. In the above picture you can just barely see what I mean. There are some wrinkles in that picture because the quilt's been folded up since I washed it.


Here it is on my bed to try to get the whole thing in one shot -- it's not that wrinkly in real life, I just put it on top of my down comforter because I was too lazy to take the comforter off (and you can clearly see the lines where I folded it). You can get a good look at the quilting and at the finished color scheme from this angle. It's still more gold and orange than I expected it to be, but I like it fine.


A close-up of the center where the lines come together. I'm mightily pleased with how neat my block intersections are: nary a slightly-off corner to be seen!


I bought this embroidered quilt label from Anne on etsy. This square is part of the pieced back: I did one strip of squares going across the back -- the rest of the back is done with one of the fabrics I used for the front squares. The pieced back looks great, and best of all it meant that I didn't have to stress out so much about perfectly lining up the pattern repeat on the backing fabric.

The specifics:

size: about 70"x 84" (I was aiming for a lap quilt and I think I overshot a bit: this is more like a twin sized quilt. Oh well -- now they can use it when guests sleep over on the couch)
Fabrics: Essex cotton/linen in "putty," various Joel Dewberry prints, mostly from Modern Meadow line with a few prints from Aviary 2; Amy Butler Full Moon Dots in green; Echino helicopters in orange; and a few other fat quarters I picked up at Purl Soho and whose fabric lines and designers I don't know. Batting is Warm and Natural 100% cotton. Gutermann cotton thread.

I've learned a lot about quilting from the three quilt projects I've made so far. My piecing is much straighter now, though not totally perfect; my cutting is a lot more accurate. I've gotten a lot better accustomed to the way my walking foot works, so there are fewer skips and puckers. Indeed, there is only one small tuck and a small slightly bubbled place in the entire quilt top: a real improvement over previous quilts. I learned with this quilt not to be too aggressive in smoothing the top as I quilted, as I found I was stretching it slightly, leading to some wrinkling and bubbling of the backing fabric. I basted this with pins, but I think I would baste future quilts with basting adhesive. It's not something I have wanted to do because I live in a small city apartment and I didn't want to get high on fumes, but I think it would make the puckering/bubbling much less of an issue. For this quilt I used cotton batting and cotton thread: I like the way the thread worked, but I have to say I am not a huge fan of the weight of the cotton batting -- this quilt is really quite heavy. It did wrinkle up beautifully in the wash, though. Maybe next time I'll follow Elizabeth Hartman's suggestion and try prewashed flannel instead of batting. I bet it would be cheaper, too.

I've become a huge quilting blog lurker recently! There are so many gorgeous quilts out there! I think that my next project is going to be a half-square triangle quilt kind of like this.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What do "we" do....we who love quilting, knitting, painting, creating....

So many projects, so little time.....

Beautiful quilt. I hope they appreciate the work that went into it.

Anonymous said...

What did your friend think of the lovely quilt?
Maria

Sheri Karobonik said...

They are very lucky to have a friend make such an awesome quilt.

~A Maria-kind-of-day~ said...

So....I meet for breakfast with the usual suspects....two wonderful long time friends...and one asks...remember that knitter, "Looking Glass"?? What ever happened to her??? I used to tell stories that you would post, we would talk about the lovely apartment you moved to....and would share your blog....Did you get tired of writing? Did you marry? Did you stop knitting? Quilting?
Maria

Anonymous said...

How did you avoid the bands rolling back on the Modified Drops Baby Eyelet Cardigan? Also, how did you avoid the bands stretching out with the fin and feather border?