Fiber Babble: Is It Possible to Catch Up?

Is It Possible to Catch Up?

September 22, 2007

The good news is that my camera is fixed and en route from the manufacturer as of yesterday. I'll say it again - it's amazing how often I want to reach for my camera every day!

I know that just because one has no camera one is not prohibited from blogging. Really I do.

The Big Quilt is now completely quilted and ready for binding and labels. This was a learning experience in so many ways, first by inserting batting strips rather than trying to wrestle the entire 112" square thing through the machine.

I think I like this method, but it also meant that instead of crawling around on the floor and basting the whole shebang together one time, I got to crawl around on the floor FOUR times, once each time I added a new batting strip. Actually, that might have been the only downside; and whatever inconvenience that may have caused is, I'm sure, a small price to pay for not having the extra bulk of batting during quilting.

I actually took pictures of part of the process but they are of course on my camera's memory card and I have no way to get them to the puter! I did manage to find a pic called "During Quilting" that I'd apparently uploaded before the camera had it's issues.

I guess I'll go into all or most of the gory details about the quilting motifs (I'll bet you can't wait, can you?). It started with four rows of 5 interconnected motifs to cover the pieced block section and the two innermost borders of the quilt. After I got that part done, I decided that there was too much room between parts of the motifs and around the edges, so I designed and put in filler bits so it was (to me) more evenly quilted.

Then came the remaining two borders. By this time, all of the batting was basted into the quilt. That worked out okay because from here on I was just going around three side edges of the quilt. Each border was quilted individually.

The first of the two borders was quilted with an interconnecting football shape that contained flourishes both inside and outside. I got to design a corner motif that was a bit more involved than the footballs, but it turned out quite well. The footballs didn't fit exactly along the bottom of the quilt (the part that will be at the foot of the bed), so I allowed for wider spacing before each corner, making what looked like foo-foo parenthesis. This is where I will quilt in the label information. Hmmm. Fortuitous, I think.

The last (outer) border was quilted with two rows - yes, I went around twice - of lily-pad-ish motifs. This motif was by far the easiest of all!

I was thinking about sharing some of the motif line-drawings with y'all. I expect that eventually I will do so, but that involves scanner and clean up and re-sizing and, well, stuff.

With the exception of the dark purple (football) border, the entire quilt was quilted with gold rayon Sulky thread on top (the dark purple used a Mettler rayon that matched). The bobbin thread was a dark variegated purple Sulky rayon. I used SIX spools of thread in the quilting alone. (!)

As I said, it's ready for binding and labels. I've taken a couple of weeks "off" from working on it only because other things were happening. It's now been two months since the kids got hitched, so I'm in a hurry to get the quilt done and shipped to them - BUT - I'm not going to rush at this point. It just will not do to ruin so much work with rushed finishing techniques!

Labels: quilting