Imagination at the Show

My Imagination 1 quilt was one of the ones I submitted to the show, so here are some photos of the (pretty much) completed quilt. It's not absolutely finished, but I'm tired of working on it and it's perfectly functional, so let's call it usefully-finished :)

I was only slightly upset that they draped this quilt after I painstakingly sewed on sleeves, hrumpf! *grins*

I'm glad I put the orange/red and purple zinger circles on the quilt, imagine it without them!


Here's a section that's not quite finished - something will go between the circles in the light green border, some kind of connecting motif...


The lighting at the show wasn't ideal, it was also already dark out, but you can just make out the outline quilting around the square shapes/strips.


What does this make you think of? Lilypads that a frog just jumped on to cause the concentric circles? Planets?


Here you can see the creative vine ranking along the border, it's growing square flowers with squares inside them.


Circles, circles, circles...


Who knows, I might be stitching on this quilt in years to come, adding to it when I feel like it :)

It's such a super soft quilt (thanks to the fabrics, some kind of special weave), I'm guaranteed to use that one when I feel under the weather and want to be cozy!

What's New?

Well, apart from the Monkey Mechanic quilt, quilting action has been slow around here.

I'm working away on the Hoot Hoot Owl applique.


Here I'm attaching the branches. After the first branch came out a bit wavy, I basted the second branch on first and then I appliqued it on. I think you're supposed to do that sometimes anyway, I just forgot. A few more stitches on the branch and then that quilt is ready for basting and (machine)quilting.


I've also been quilting on the Love U in Green quilt. Great little project to take to my bee meetings (we've met twice so far, it's fun!). I decided on concentric squares and like the effect quite a lot. As you can see, I've got a bit of attention deficit going on, as I can't seem to finish a square before starting the next one, so I have several on the go, in various stages of completion :)


I'm also on the final touches of the Imagination 1 quilting, here's a sneak preview:

The Border:
Some of the circle quilting:

Unfortunately, it's been much too hot to hand-quilt these past few days, and the soccer world cup demanded some attention as well, but now that all that is over, I'll get back to stitching :)

Oh, and some of you had wondered about the border on the WonderChain quilt, this is the stencil I used for it. I really liked working with stencils. I've tried free-hand hand-quilting before, as well as free-hand drawing a pattern on, and it just doesn't look as good as a stencil in terms of uniformity. I have a small collection of stencils now and will certainly use them again!

Full Imagination

Almost done, yay! I've made some decisions about the borders, still working on that...

Here's a view of most of the quilt, with some of the backing and the one lonely raw edge still to be bound :)


Now some concentric circles in full force (I like them a lot!):

I did the small/narrow circles free-hand, simply 'eyeing' it, but the larger ones turned out wonky, so I used chalk to mark them first.

The city-scape or bargraph (depending if I feel metropolitan or scientific) was simply outlined with a line approx. 1/4" from the seam.


Here's the start of the border quilting. Circles on the inner one, I'm still figuring out what to do in between, I have some ideas.

And in the outer, darker border, I'm quilting a vine but instead of flowers there are diamonds quilted in between, to repeat the round/edgy theme of this quilt.


And, with raw edge and still some visible basting thread, this quilt is in full use already!

Getting Edgy

Oh, I'm laughing about my own title because this post is about binding and quilt edges ;)

I just couldn't wait anymore to start finishing my Imagination 1 quilt. I'm not done with all the quilting yet, though I'm getting there, but I was just itching to put the binding on!

So the other night, I started cutting the edges away to square the quilt up.


Oh, it was so exciting, a big step (as opposed to all the teeny-tiny handstitches!).

I sewed the prepared binding strip on the next morning, and lo and behold, I had miscalculated so enormously that a whole side was missing. Silly me :)

I hand-stitched the 3 sides I had binding for on anyway, and will add to the binding strip soon, to complete that step. It feels awesome to work with a finished edge, anyway!

The concentric circles are working out really nicely by the way. I had blogged about the design here, and I'm pretty much sticking with it. You'll see some pictures soon!

Some Hand-Quilting Progress

Here's a bit of a pre-view - with admittedly not very much to see - of the echo-quilting on my Imagination 1 quilt. I have hand-quilting threads of all the colours in the quilt and am echoing with random colour choices around the circles. I've also started to echo around the bars on the edge because I'm itching to take the basting stitches out - I get caught in them a lot.


I borrowed a large frame from my quilting teacher Helen, but now I took the quilt with me on a visit, no space for the frame, so I'm lap-quilting it anyway (the way I've hand-quilted the MODA baby quilt I started last May, as well).

Here's the quilt spread out at my grandma's, and look what's hanging in a place of honour on the wall!! The teddy bear quilt I made her Christmas 2008 - yay, that makes me happy!


Notice those dark patches in the blue background? I think I must have turned the fabric over by accident there (you can't tell front and back with the bare eye) or maybe the grain goes a different way and that's why these dark patches keep showing up on the photos. In reality, it all just looks uniformly blue - I'm glad about that :)


In other news...

I've decided that I want to start using up my stash more, starting March 1. Stash-busting it's called, I guess. I bet most of you are rolling on the floor laughing right now, thinking "that'd be more like myth-busting, quilters don't de-stash without re-stashing" :) Well, there may be a big move coming up in the next 2 years, and I definitely don't want to lug 3 boxes with fabrics down all those stairs from the top floor! I guess that means I have to give the quilts away or sell them, cause other wise I'll just be lugging down three boxes of quilts ;)

You can all be the judges of how successful I'll be. Maybe the most important step would be to cancel my subscription to the Fabricville (in other provinces Fabricland) flyers which always have these tempting sales in them!

My Quilting Plan

Some of you wondered how I'm planning to quilt the Imagination 1/Soft quilt.  I have a couple of ideas in mind and drafted them for you in my highly sophisticated drafting program called powerpoint :)

Circles seem to be the dominant theme, I don't know if I'll get the column-theme in there too, or leave it at the pieced columns.  A work in progress ;)

Call Me Crazy :)

EDIT:  The blue in the background of the quilt isn't as different as it looks here - it's actually all the same shade, but I think there was a slight different  on the front vs back of the fabric, which I didn't notice at the time.  Not this bad though :)

As you can see by these strange lines, I basted with thread instead of pins this time.

Because I've decided that I need to spend LOTS of time with this quilt since I'm in love with it and want to bond properly.


So I will be hand-quilting this puppy :) Wahoo!

I just went to my former quilting teachers to borrow here snap-quilt-frame - I'll give it a try, since this quilt is a bit big for lap quilting



Here's the backing fabric - it's just as soft as the front fabric, though it's not from the same line. It was a steal at 3$/m!


Good night lovely quilt! (The instructions said to remove the snaps so the quilt can breathe, oh dear :) I assume they mean 'so it doesn't crease' haha!

I've Been Hit Again (of Soft Quilt Part 2)

By inspiration...

I found a new, very cool blog called Film and Thread and this post in particular showed a cool cool quilt. I thought that I'd like to try what I call an unbalanced design, where there either isn't a pattern or it doesn't continue over the whole quilt.

So I came up with this - I called it "Imagination 1" as I'm obviously planning #2, #3 etc as well :)


In my mind, I saw a white background with maybe blues, turquoises and browns, or maybe a MODA charm pack for the circles, for which I've found a tutorial here.

However, the decision was difficult until I remembered my 'soft' fabric!


I blogged about this AGES AGO! Way back when I first started. I loved the fabric for its soft feel, even though it's just normal 100% cotton. The fabrics aren't purely one colour though, the green for example has some orange threads woven in, it gives the fabrics much more vibrancy (more than you can probably detect on the photos :).

Anyway, this was to be the fabric for "Imagination 1" and I went about chop-chop-chopping :)

The whole thing was a figure-out-while-you-go project, mostly fun, sometimes frustrating, and it ate up my entire weekend, but gosh, that quilt needed to get out of my system!



I very nearly ran out of blue, I have a few 6" pieces left over, but that's it. I had hoped for the quilt center to be much bigger, but really wanted the blue as background.


At this stage, it measured about 40" x 50", but I'm putting light green (4" wide) and dark green (6" wide) borders around it, so it'll get up to a decent lap quilt size.

Even just the center was bigger than the current lap quilt I'm using, which is just a teensy bit too small for my likes.

I'm very very excited for this quilt to get finished. I have lots of green fabric left for the backing, and this soft quilt will be mine and mine alone!