Love in a Mist

Finishes fast and furious this past week! 😊 Today I have the throw in my newest pattern Winter Blues to show you. It is yet another spin on this (if I may say so myself) wonderful pattern!

The light pink and dark pink magnolias close to the lake are at their finest right now, just jaw-dropping magical. When I walked by this old girl on my morning walk on Thursday I knew it would be a great spot for a glamour shot.

It took me a little while to figure out a name for the quilt but when I was trimming it after taking it off the longarm earlier this week, it just came into my head: Love in a Mist. My mum had those flowers I was sure of it and I just felt her presence; perhaps she’d whispered it to me and my heart heard her. So I looked them up:

Pretty apt name I’d say. And of course the added meanings of love for the hearts and mist for the soft blended, look to this quilt. Here it is on the design wall. I was pleasantly surprised how square it was. I didn’t even wet it to block it, just pinned it into the foam board and left it there overnight. 

Here was my attempt at a glamour shot in front of my own magnolia which is only eight years old, unlike the 60+ year old one in the first photo. Good texture shot though!

A funny outtake:

Here is the back, a fabric my aunt gave me when she gave me a bag of some cottons a few years ago. It’s a vintage one, more vintage than my vintage fabrics(!!), a beautiful soft lawn fabric, a piece of which I used on another quilt of my own design. 

The fabric was 45" wide, and this quilt is 44.5" so it was just too tight, so I cut it apart along the fold, and added a strip from one of the heart fabrics that blended well with the colours. That strip is actually three strips from the less than fat quarter left of fabric! I was able to line it up not too badly!

Both labels, cloth and satin. and a look at the binding which is another of the fabrics, one I'd picked up a yard of (the others were ½ yards) because I liked it the best I guess, or maybe past me was thinking of binding for the future me's quilt! 

Resting on one of our rhododendrons

Another look at the binding effect, front and back.

When MacGyver was taking the photos here, it said, "Hold still; I want to get a bit of an angle on it." I didn't quite understand what he was getting at, but I like this shot!

Give me the magnolias, all the magnolias

I remembered to get him to take a shot of me with my quilt! It was not long after a bit of rain, so bright enough but no sun to wash things out, and oh, the lovely lime green grass plays so well with the pink of the trees and the colours of the quilt!

Now for those of you who saw my post on Monday, April 28, on Instagram, the start of quilting it. Yes, I loaded it sideways because the back had that long strip pieced vertically, so those seams are better when they're parallel to the bars that the quilt gets rolled onto as I work my way down it. When I designed the quilt, I didn't want it to have borders, just a blended background, but when I started the quilting, I had the idea to quilt feathers in that border-not-border.

On Tuesday April 29, when I pulled it off the longarm and set the spool of Aurifil in the valley for a shot for Insta, I had a fit. A massive oops had occurred and I could've died. I'd forgotten to quilt the feathers on the left side of the quilt (which was the bottom edge because of loading it sideways). Noooo!

As you can see, I went ahead and squared it and bound it, all the while thinking, should I load it back up and do those feathers and then sit on the couch one evening and pick out all the swirls and hooks underneath? But how would I secure the swirls and hooks that are not in that border-not-border? I decided to live with it for the photos and see if it bothered me enough to do it. I showed MacGyver and didn't tell him what was wrong, and he had no idea even though he really studied it trying to find what was wrong with the quilting.

So. When I was uploading the photos, I realized it didn't bother me at all. In fact, I nearly forgot to write here about the massive oops I'd hinted at the other day on Instagram. I love the quilt, and I love how different it is from the other three!

Quilt Stats:

Size: 44.5" x 54.5"

Pattern: Winter Blues by moi!
Fabric: stash--Chalk & Paint by Sew Caroline for Art Gallery Fabrics; the two backgrounds are Chickadees & Berries by Jackie Robinson for Benartex and Romancing the Sea by Jennifer Sampou for Northcott Silk, Inc.

Batting: Hobbs 80/20 cotton/polyester fusible (but I didn't fuse it)

Backing: unknown cotton lawn

Quilted: on Avril, 67 947 stitches

Threads: pieced with Exquisite polyester on my Bernina; quilted with Aurifil; Bottom Line in the bobbin

The pattern, Winter Blues, is available in my Etsy shop, SandraJaneQuilts. There are three designs within the pattern: the original ombré baby quilt size, the Glowing Hearts wallhanging (both are 40" square), and this throw which is a completely different layout to the other two.

Linking Up

My Quilt Infatuation

Alycia Quilts

From Bolt to Beauty

Songbird Designs