Seeing Spots - Finished Quilt

This quilt has been quite a long time in the making. I did the quilt top back in November 2011, and started quilting it then, doing bits and pieces of the hand quilting over the following summer, but then it got put aside and not picked up for a long time.



However, I recently finished the quilting on it, and then eventually got around to getting some fabric for the binding and doing that, and now it's finally finished! Hooray!



Not much to say that hasn't already been said, but I do adore the hand quilting on this one. The matching threads on the front make a gorgeous pattern on the back!

Oh, and incase I come back to check this in the future, I chose bamboo batting for it, which is really lovely and soft, and was fine for hand quilting with,



This one has pride of place on my couch, for snuggling under when I need a little extra warmth.

Quietly busy...

While things have been a bit quiet around here lately, it's because things have been busy elsewhere in my life. But that doesn't mean I haven't been working on things. In particular I have been slowly working on a long forgotten work in progress, a quilt that has been sat on the back of my couch for about 2 years waiting for the last third or so if hand quilting to be finished.

I'm getting close to finishing now, and will hopefully soon be able to go and pick out some binding...

Concentric Circles

While I was quilting the concentric circles pattern on my genome quilt I had a few people ask me how I marked the circles, so I thought I would put together a post explaining the method that I used.

As I wanted my circles to be perfectly concentric, evenly spaced and for all the circles in the quilt to be the same sizes, I made myself a cardboard template. The card I used was some medium thickness card that I got from an art supplies store. The store I went to was actually very generous - I went in and explained what I needed the card for and the guy said he knew exactly what to suggest and showed me the card I ended up getting, which was just right. I asked him how much it was and he said free! Apparently the card is actually the packaging that the fancy paper that they get comes in and they throw it away anyway! Score!

Anyway, since I wanted my circles to get quite big I needed to fashion some kind of compass - for which I used a blob of bluetac and a map-pin to be my central pivot point, and then I taped some stay tape to a pencil, which I would use to measure the radius of the circle. I did however find that the stay tape stuck to the bluetac, so I put a bit of paper between the tape and the bluetac and it worked perfectly. In the picture below you can see me marking the circles on the card, I made my lines 2 inches apart. To maximise the size of the circles I could draw, I just made a template for half the circle.

I then needed to cut along the lines to make it into a template - I cut out every other half circle arch, as shown in the photo below. To make sure that the centres of my circles stayed in the same place I kept a thin strip along the edge to hold all the arches in the same places. I also marked the centre of my circles so that I could place the template over it when I moved it to draw the other half.

I then drew around the circles with my washable pencil

I chose pink lead because it would show on the white, blue and green fabrics in the quilt

And then lastly I stitched along my traced lines.

I didn't mark the whole quilt at once, I did a couple of patches of circles at a time, starting in the middle and working my way out in each direction until I'd filled all the spaces.

"Oh Beehave" - My Finished Quilt

So, I have finished my quilt for the MMQG quilting bee "Oh Beehave". As you may or may not remember, I asked the ladies in the bee to make me two wonky star blocks - one red on sand, and the other sand on red. I then put the blocks together into essentially two tops, and quilted it with perle 8 thread by hand - first 1/4 inch around all the stars (on the front and the back), and then adding some more stars into any big spaces that still needed some stitching.

I was initially thinking of binding it in a solid red a little bit darker than the red in the quilt, but didn't manage to find any fabric in any of my local quilt shops in the right colour. However, while I was at Amitie the lovely lady serving me suggested a stripe that they had - which conveniently happened to be in exactly the two right colours.

I have entered this quilt in the "Quilts from All Over" show that's being organised by Hawthorn Rotary Club, so added the binding to finish the quilt this weekend. Now I just need to add a temporary hanging sleeve before the show.

Priorities vs desires

After my post on Friday I reassessed my wardrobe and decided that I should be able to scrape together enough clothes for a week from my wardrobe and rather than make a shirt what I really wanted to do was start quilting the genome quilt

So that's what I did. Three sets of concentric circles down... lots left to go. I'm loving it so far!

Multi-tasking...

So, it turns out that hand quilting is an activity that can be done very well while hanging out with people... which is what I did this weekend.

I've made great progress quilting my wonky stars - I've quilted around nearly all the stars. Once I've finished that I need to fill in the space in between them. I've been quilting with red perle 8, which means nice big stitches! I'm a big fan of this method, it makes the quilting go pretty quickly, making it enjoyable rather than a chore!