Although I've loved SO MANY of the quilts featured over the years, this is the first (and the only) quilt kit that I bought out of American Patchwork & Quilting's "Quilt Sampler" magazine. It was in the Fall/Winter 2011 edition, a quilt from Country Fabrics and Quilting in Brainerd, Minnesota. I fell in love with the unusual (at the time) combination of red with aqua, and I just loved the riot of colour.
I already talked about the beginnings of cutting and piecing the quilt blocks here, so I'm not going to repeat myself. I am really happy with the end result, even though some of the fabrics in my quilt are different from those shown in the magazine. I guess that they can never anticipate how well a kit will sell; they have no crystal ball, so they did switch out some of the fabrics in the original kits for different ones. The shades were all pretty much the same; the only one I didn't really care for is the green with brown and yellow swirly figure 8s. A piece of this is in the lower left corner of the border. The green was not quite right with the aqua in the rest of the quilt. Yet it is part of Tula Pink's Parisville line.
It's pretty big, finishing at 76 1/2 X 89 1/4 ". I will take it up North to quilt on my Avanté, and I'm excited because I already know (ha - better write it down) how I am going to quilt it: I plan to do a similar elongated figure 8 (Angela Walters often does these) in the red "ribbons", and techniques I'm learning in Angela's Dot to Dot Quilting class I'm taking on Craftsy in the aqua background triangles. I have to get backing fabric though...drat, probably will go online to either The Fat Quarter Shop or to Pink Chalk Fabrics and check out their sale fabric. I need 6 yards maybe a bit more, so will be looking in the sale section online or in person at my LQS, hoping to get $5/yard range. Can you hear how really sad I am about having to shop for more fabric?!
Here it is in the original 26 Projects pics I took back in December:
Faith Jones writes, in a book I recently purchased, Vintage Quilt Revival, "You can change the entire look of a quilt design by rotating the blocks 45 degrees to place them 'on point'." (p. 39) Incidentally, this is an amazing book, which I have been slowly savouring over the past couple of weeks. Placing blocks on point is not new to me at all, but what she writes is very true. Here is the quilt in construction:
Piecing the diagonal rows. My Book It! method doesn't work for this kind of block setting. The orientation of the background aqua triangles can get a little tricky.
Tricky too was keeping the blocks and rows on the design wall...thank goodness for fine pins, as I pinned into the wallboard just far enough to hold the block/row in place! Shh! Don't tell Joe. Tricky yet again, as I didn't get a "step back and view" look of the very bottom right corner, thanks to the bed in the way with nowhere to move it, until I'd pieced those 3 rows together.....only to discover that two of the same squares of fabric touched each other. Oh NO! I decided not to try to change things at that point, with a nod to the Amish quiltmakers who purposely sewed a "mistake" into their quilts, a symbol for them that only God is perfect. And I found I'm okay with it!
One last look.
I couldn't get up high enough to get the entire quilt in the picture, but you get the idea!
Oh wow that looks just beautiful but no time for further comment......I got something I gotta tell Joe.
ReplyDeleteLOL!!