Bloggers Quilt Festival

I've decided to partake in the Bloggers Quilt Festival that Park City Girl is hosting on her blog.

I had to pick one of my finished quilts and tell the story about it, and it's too bad that a lot of my quilts are in progress and I'm so new at quilting that I don't have that many done yet.

I picked my first full size quilt, the Late Fall Quilt, so named because of the colours, which reminded me of that time of year after all the beautiful leaves have fallen and the grass has turned that yellowish-brown.

The story behind this quilt is this: I made it as part of an evening class taught by two very talented quilters. I had never really quilted before but have always been a bit crafty, so quilting really intrigued me.

I bought some fabrics that kind of matched from the clearance section of a local fabric store as I didn't want to spend a fortune on a potentially disastrous piece of work :) However, since I'm part perfectionist and a logical thinker, I really took to quilting.


The trickiest part was choosing the colours, as I just couldn't imagine what they would look like in the final pattern. In fact, I couldn't imagine until the quilt top was finished!!

The whole class made a double Irish chain in the 10 week course. I usually don't go with the flow, so of course I decided to reverse the pattern to have the dark colour in the center and the lighter ones in the chain. On top of that, the leafy fabric was my favourite and I wanted to have large sections of it on the quilt.

I started sewing away, not being that happy with my colour choices all throughout the piecing process, and threatening to give it away, but lo and behold, when that top came together, I fell irreversably in love with the quilt and quilting in general. I ended up giving the quilt away after all, as a Christmas gift to my mom, but only because I liked it so much, not because I needed to get rid of it!





And now it's 7 months later and I'm working on my 10th quilt, coming up with my own pattern variations and getting better and better at choosing fabrics and being confident that they'll turn into a great quilt. That in fact is my favourite part of quilting: all those random pieces of fabric transforming into a beautiful finished product! Amazing.

The blogging/quilting community has given me so much inspiration over the months, that I think it's a really great idea to bring many of us together in an online quilt festival! It's wonderful to have so many like-minded crafty people out there!

Late Fall Quilt (Double Irish Chain) Part 3

Finished!

Having created a quilting room really helped the process. Here's the finished product:





All I have to do now is hid the hundreds of threads hanging out and wrapping it up for christmas...

Here's a close up of the two more interesting fabrics I used, an English Toile in red brown, and the leafy fall theme. The yellow fabric I call wallpaper fabric in my mind :)

Late Fall Quilt (Double Irish Chain) Part 2

The quilt top is now finished, including the borders.


Here it is pinned to the backing and batting - what a tedious job that was!!!


And I'm now busily quilting away on it. I did the binding first, which I might not do next time around in case of shifting material, but since I had used so many pins, my teacher said it'd be okay to bind first, quilt later. I started by stabilizing the quilt with outlines of all the main blocks. I'm doing free motion around the outside (dark) border and in the open (dark) spaces between the crossing chains. In the red-brown border, I'm doing an interlacing curvey pattern.

This is my quilting set-up so far. It's not ideal, because there's so much material pulling, despite being on the table. It's a major pain in the... Also, I've been eating my meals sitting on a camping chair in the kitchen, because I'm obviously not taking this whole machinery-quilt concoction off the table 3 times a day...

Late Fall Quilt (Double Irish Chain) Part 1

So, I've made a quite a bit of progress in my quilting classes! Things are starting to come together and patterns are forming. Here's a quick intro to quilting: Irish Double Chain 101.


First, get the tools together: cutting mat, quilting ruler and rotary cutter (like sharp pizza cutter):

And of course an iron, ironing board and instructions:


Next, pick the material, which needs to be washed, dried and ironed but never steamed:

Then we cut it into strips (they're folded up so that I could cut them on my cutting mat):

And lastly - for now - the strips are sewn together according to a detailed plan and with lots of rules to follow.

Next class we'll cut the joined strips so that we get short strips with several squares sewn together. Then these smaller strips will be laid out to form a block and sewn together. In the end, all the blocks will be laid out and sewn together and then the quilting part begins.