The Big Quilt

January 05, 2008

The Big Quilt (which never got a more clever name) has taken up my time and attention and care since the end of July, 2007. It's at
its new home and was appropriately ooh-ed and aah-ed over.

I have a zillion pictures of the construction (quilting) stage. Half a zillion pictures of the finished quilt, including closeups of the quilting from every angle I could find. I will not subject you to those. In fact, I'm not sure why I took them, but that's the way is goes/went.

Some details - the quilt finished at about 114" square (9.5 feet). The blocks are 12" finished size. They are all the same block, only varying the placement of color/value and occasionally splitting up one component into something more complicated - such as changing a plain square to a square-in-square.

The colors, while certainly not traditional, all come from the border print. There is neither green nor red in this quilt. I think most of the other colors in the rainbow are represented, though.

Machine quilting alone took about 55 hours, or the unabridged Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix plus 12 complete Nero Wolfe stories on tape. The quilting took 3+ spools of gold rayon, 3+ spools of variegated purple rayon, and 1 spool of non-variegated purple rayon thread (that adds up to 6,000 feet, give or take)(a mile is 5,280 feet). I used my regular Bernina sewing machine.


I used Glad Wrap Press 'n Seal for the center (block) motifs, chalk pencil and home-made stencils for some of the border patterns, and a Clover iron-off white pen and home-made stencils for other border patterns (I've decided I love this pen, even though I went through THREE of them [at six bucks a pop] on this quilt). The quilting on the blocks is made of rows of one connected motif overlaid with opposite direction rows of a coordinating connected motif. Each border contains its own, different, quilting pattern.

I even kinda labelled it, but this post is picture heavy enough. You can click here to see a not-so-stellar picture of the labelling (you might have to hunt for it!).

Labels: quilting

permalink 5 Comments:

At 1/06/2008 5:43 AM,  Sweet P Babbled Back:  

What a truly stunning quilt!

At 1/06/2008 1:30 PM,  Kyla Nicole Babbled Back:  

WOW. Over a mile of thread in the quilting?? O_O

Yes, yes, we *LOVE* the quilt. It's been a lifesaver over the past few days, while we've been bombarded by this terrible storm (cold cold cold, and frequent loss of power).

As for "there is no red and green", or whatever, we have it on our bed with our purple sheets, and RED fleece blanket underneath, and it looks fantastic. Charles said that he'd say it was a red quilt O_o

.....

We just went and inspected, and there are small bits of dk.red in the border print. But Charles says you'll prolly just "pull a Kyla, and say it's not red, it's 'Merlot', or something" ;) lol

Thank you thank you!<3

(p.s. I think the cats have surgically attached themselves to this quilt; they can't get enough of it :)

At 1/06/2008 2:24 PM,  T Babbled Back:  

Ahhhh... merlot? Gosh, how quickly I forget. Yes, of course. Lots of merlot. Silly me. What was I thinking?

Oh, wait. You mean the color. Yeah. That, too.

At 1/12/2008 4:54 PM,  TracyKM Babbled Back:  

WOW!! Gorgeous! Whenever I sew anything, I'm amazed at just how much thread I go through, I can't even imagine how much for a quilt like that!

At 1/19/2008 9:52 AM,  Anonymous Babbled Back:  

Love that Kaffe Fasset fabric.

Do you really have Nero Wolf on tape? That is so cool!

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