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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

More finishes!

Yes, I have been quilting during the past two (three? eek!) months. I'm just awful at photographing my progress!

So let's see, last we talked I was in the process of quilting Celtic Solstice. One of the stencils I had bought was not feeling quite right for the design.


So I went into illustrator, mocked up the block, and sketched up a new design of arcs, similar to the style I had quilted on the other blocks.

Here's the printout of the quilting design.


I'm sure the pounce pad people don't want you to know this, but you really don't need to buy stencils to go with your pounce pad. These printouts work great. I just stitched out the design with no thread and then used the pounce pad on it. Below is the backside so you can see my stencil holes.



 And here it is laid out for marking. I snipped out the triangles to help with alignment.


Miss Rosie provided quality control! She looks really annoyed in this picture, huh? ;)


During the quilting, I was shocked to find the following error. Can you see it?


It seems I used that green square as test fabric for my zigzag stitch at some point! And it ended up in the final quilt! Luckily it was easy to pick out.

The stitching was done on this quilt quite some time ago, but I only finished recently because I took so long to sew down the binding. I decided to order a pack of wonder clips from Massdrop. Have you used them? They have a quilting section and post one new quilting product per day. One big downside is that it takes forever to get your items. (Also the sales are not always that great, check around online before you buy!) Anyways, three weeks later when the clips finally showed up I was super happy and FINALLY got this quilt finished!

The wonder clips were great. I am a convert!

Here's the only shot of the finished quilt I have so far. I need to do some glamour shots soon. (And apparently I took this photo before the binding was sewn down)

It fits on our bed! This is a big accomplishment, we don't have any other bed-sized quilts yet. And yes, my room is a mess. But let's focus on the quilt! Ooh aah! (Psst - do you see Pepper waiting to jump on top? For some reason she LOVES this quilt! The entire time I was binding it she would burrow underneath and take naps!)


A note on the batting - this quilt was made with wool batting by Quilter's Dream. I really like their company and their battings. So far I have had no trouble quilting with it. I didn't experience any pilling problems although there are bits of batting all over it that I still need to go through and pick off - I think they came off from the bits hanging out the edges while I was quilting. It seems soft but lightweight. I will let you know more after I've used it longer.

Onto other projects...here is a fun side project that took up a week of my time:


 These are supposed to be campaign ribbons for a cat-themed trivia night. There was a table decoration contest. Our team name was "James Garfield Lasagna Party" and was supposed to be Garfield (the cat) running for president, so I made these Garfield kitty campaign ribbons for everyone to wear. I think the theme was a little too obscure/difficult to understand though so we didn't win the decoration contest.

The other big thing I my list was knocking out Grand Illusion once and for all! With Celtic Solstice I burned out before adding the final border, and I didn't want that to happen here. So I sat down and got those border pieces sewn!

Unfortunately, when I went to sew the border on, it was a full two inches too short. W.T.F.


I read and re-read the instructions. All I can think is a seam allowance issue that compounded. I definitely followed all of the instructions correctly. So this was really frustrating and after some distressed phone calls to my mom and paces around the house, I added filler fabric to each end of the border pieces.


So you can see in that photo, those extra lime strips aren't actually supposed to be there. But in the end I don't think they lock as awful as I feared they would.

Here's the finished top on my bed. It's even bigger than Celtic Solstice!



Now I attempted some glamour shots outside for this one, but a thunderstorm was rolling in at the time and it was really windy. Here's the best shot.



And some outtakes...



I think everyone agrees that it doesn't have quite the same pop as Celtic Solstice, but I do still really like the colors I chose for it. This one is getting folded up for a while, and will be quilted maybe in the fall. In the meantime I have started some fun, easy project, and have another quilt top nearly complete! I will share that in a future post.

To close, here's Pepper interrupting my photo shoot.