31 October 2011

Bloggers' Quilt Festival Fall 2011

The time has come for the Bloggers' Quilt Festival Fall 2011 ... and this is my contribution:

Night on the Tiles - with binding

Night on the Tiles was inspired by the floor tiling of my favourite pub in Manchester, just down the street from where I took my first lessons in patchwork and quilting. I've been working on it for 3+ years now, in fact, every time I go on my annual quilt retreat, this one comes along. It's not finished but it will be and soon - or so I hope. As you can see, I have gone about it a bit backward by adding the binding before I finished the hand-quilting. But it already looks so much better that I am really motivated to finish this one before the next retreat in September 2012.

Diagonal strips of blocks assembled Ah, the litte imperfections ...
Top finished Back to hand quilting
top in progress - endless imperfections
top finished - hand quilting

"Vital Statistics":
Finished size approx 220 * 220 cm
all cotton fabric
all cotton thread
all cotton wadding
machine pieced
hand quilted
machine / hand bound.

27 October 2011

Quilting Almondesque

Did you know? Good prep work makes machine quilting so much easier and so much more enjoyable! You did? And you never told me???

I painstakingly pinned the whole thing and then taped about a centimetre away from where I wanted to quilt. Then I practically flew through half the quilting ...

Half-quilted front


Now I need to strip the tape and re-apply new tape at a 90 degree angle. And I'm not holding out great hope that I placed my pins strategically enough.

24 October 2011

Progress II

So I spend all evening on the floor with this:

Pinning II
only to turn it over ...
Pinning III - the back
to find that I had scrimped too much ...
(inject cursing here)
and now having to spend more time fixing my cheapskateness ...
Fixing I