Fandango quilt

A follow up to the sneak peek a couple of weeks ago.  I bought a number of fat quarters of Kate Spain's Fandango line for Moda off TradeMe last year, and started putting them together into a quilt early this year.  The white sashing is a white on white print from Spotlight - I was not quite ready to go the whole hog and use a true solid.  You can tell by the granny squares that I have moved on...

Because there are quite a few different colours in the various print fabrics, I wanted to keep both the block design and sashing nice and simple.  Chunky squares surrounded by a (mostly) contrasting border keeps things pretty simple.

Initially, I wanted to quilt this myself, even though it is quite large, at approximately 82 inches square.  I even got as far as basting the whole thing.  However, I really wanted denser quilting in the white areas and minimal quilting in the blocks.  I have done a tiny bit of free-motion quilting, but really need more practise and this was not the quilt for that.

In the end, I had the quilt long-arm quilted by Sue Burnett with a light feather design in the sashing and a heavier feather design in the border.  The inner square of the block is stitched in the ditch to keep everything stable.  I have used Sue's long-arm quilting services before - she lives very locally to me and is fantastic.  I will definitely go back if I have other projects that I think would benefit from long-arm quilting.

The quilt is backed with a striped fabric I picked up at Spotlight.  I think it works really well with the colours in the Fandango line.  It is bound with all those fat quarter strips I cut up.  Because this quilt is so large, and I have other projects on the go, I decided to finish the binding by machine rather than by hand, using this tutorial from Red Pepper Quilts.

Overall, I am really happy with how this quilt turned out.  I am particularly happy that I decided to go with the feather pattern for the quilting - I think it really brings the quilt together.

Linking up with the Kate Spain Blog Hop at Blossom Heart Quilts:

 

A man quilt

You might think from the title of this post that this is a quilt made for a man.  That is true, but it is also a quilt made by a man.  More details to follow this weekend when I take some better photos.

A sneak peek

I have a finished quilt but no photos yet.  I had it long-arm quilted and got it back this weekend. So I was forced into a task I was not much looking forward to.

I used Fandango by Kate Spain for Moda to make this quilt.  However, I didn't have any yardage - only fat quarters.  Therefore, since I wanted the binding to match, I had to make the binding out of fat quarters as well.  SO. MANY. BIAS. SEAMS. By some miracle, none of them ended up on a corner when I bound the quilt.

You can see another shot of the binding pieces all stacked up behind Ralph,

Ralph and his sister Ivy love "helping" me quilt.  They usually like to test fabric by rolling all over it, to make sure it is nice and soft.

Binding is sooo tempting for little cats.

All the Grannies

I was sick last week and had several days off work.  I cranked up the heater and camped out in the lounge with the Olympic Games and my sewing machine.

I had a quilt to bind, but was feeling too low on energy to try and wrangle binding onto it.  So, instead, I worked on my granny squares.

There are a lot of small pieces in each granny square, and a lot of seams.  Because I was working with charm packs, and wanted to keep these scrappy, I didn't really have the option of strip piecing these (although, if I made them again, I would be tempted to follow this method).  In other circumstances, the time consuming nature of this project might have driven me a bit batty.

I have cut quite a few of the sashing strips I will need to put this quilt together.  I have made them quite wide so the coloured granny squares will look like they're floating.  Now to trim all 25...