I finally finished the quilt that I gave a sneak peek of earlier. This quilt is made of scraps and nine-patch blocks left over from the quilt I made as a wedding present.
I didn't have enough nine-patch blocks to make anything decent sized, so I decided to slice them up into quarter square triangles and mix them up with the light fabric. Also, I had never pieced triangles before and scraps seemed like a good place to start.
Really, this quilt is just the result of me playing around with fabric. Once I had finished the central part, I decided to add the plain narrow border, and then the border of the bird fabric (part of the Nest line by Valori Wells) which was a feature fabric in the original quilt. I really wanted to use this fabric in large pieces so that the design was shown to its full potential.
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Once the top was finished, it sat in my cupboard for over a year before I was ready to quilt it. This is the first quilt I basted, and the first quilt I started quilting. I stitched in the ditch around the blocks in the centre of the quilt, and on the diagonal. Then I had to work out what to do with the border. I needed to do something straight-line, and decided to quilt straight lines from the inner border to the edge of the quilt, spaced about 1 cm apart. It took ages, and is the reason why I got a whole other quilt basted and quilted before I finished quilting this one. The border quilting alone took me about eight hours in front of the machine (not all in one go, obviously). However, I am really happy with the way it turned out. Close up, all the quilting lines in the borders make it look a bit like the birds are behind bars - hence the title to this post.
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The back looks cool too. The striped fabric is from Spotlight. I am quite a fan of stripes for the back of a quilt - is anyone else with me on this?
This quilt is an awkward size, about 50 inches square. A bit big for a baby quilt, and too small to sleep under. Nevermind, I will keep it, since it is my first quilting attempt. Do other people like to keep their "firsts"? Since this was a keeper quilt, I hand stitched the binding.
5 comments:
It's a lovely quilt - I love the way you've used the birds as a border, and the way you quilted it is great. I also love the stripes:-)
What a gorgeous quilt! It's so pretty, and I feel very inspired by the quilting.
This quilt is fantastic---you did an awesome job 'playing' with the fabric. :) That border fabric is gorgeous---great job on the quilting.
I love your quilt. That border fabric is amazing, your quilting looks great and the colors are so appealing. Great job!
I love it, it's beautiful. I didn't keep my first quilt, but I do visit it at my mums, I have kept the next three though, and they're all on smaller size, but too big for cot quilts, so they're on the sofas and I still love to look at them and check out my favourite fabrics from that time.
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