Done Like Dinner!

Thanksgiving was this past weekend, and one of the things I was thankful for was time to wrap up the Blue Meanies quilt (the name is explained here).  I've been keeping it for today, Sew-n-Tell Friday.



Overall, I was happy with the quilting that I ended up doing.  It was all right angles, rather than the curly quilting I normally do.  And it is very densely quilted - I used up one 500m spool of thread and about half of another one - King Tut cotton in "Baby Blanket", which is variegated blue, yellow and purple, which sounds a bit severe, but actually looks pretty good.



As you see, I decided to skip the border and go straight to the binding.  One reason for this was I got it into my head that the blocks in this one made it look too similar to I'll Be Seeing You, and I ditched the notion of borders to make them more distinct.  Now that it's finished, I see how different it is, but I am still totally satisfied with the sans-border decision.



At the last Sew-n-Tell post, when I asked if I should have a border, one of the comments was that I should think about a red border.  That really twigged for me, so I chose this red/orange/purple/blue Kaffe Fassett for the binding.  I absolutely love it!  My daughter was horrified when I showed her what I was planning to use.  "Trust me," I said; fortunately, she was sold when it all came together - now she denies she ever disliked it!


I found it very hard to select fabric for the back.  I had never envisioned it as green, but green is what came out.  I like it 85%.  I had to pin the quilt to the clothesline sideways to keep it from dragging on the ground.  In consequence, this photo makes the pieced pinwheels look crooked, but they really aren't.




It's got bamboo/cotton batting.  What a fantastic drape that has!

It's Friday and I'm Finished!

I'm finished just in time for Friday Sew-N-Tell!  That is to say, I've finished one step in the long cloth-to-quilt process.  The Whirligigs quilt top is pieced, and in the process named itself after the villains in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie.  Introducing the Blue Meanies!  See the resemblance?

I think it's interesting how the immediate dramatic element is those light hourglasses, rather than the pinwheels. It's one of the exciting parts of quilting - seeing what unexpected effects emerge from the block pattern and initial design. Now, I have to tell you that my points are not perfect, but I plead guilty with an explanation. You may notice that half the pinwheels spin one way and the others go the other way (see lame joke about Australia in a previous post). I pieced all the thisaway blocks a couple of weeks ago, with my regular, devil-may-care seam allowance. Then last weekend, I attended the Square in a Square workshop, with her military insistence on scant quarter-inch seam allowances (and they do look nice, so no complaints). But when I came back to sew up all the thataway blocks, even though I reminded myself to ease up on the seam allowance to match the other ones, I found that the second set of blocks measured, in some cases, a full half-inch bigger than the first set. I was as careful as I could be through the trimming and truing process to size the blocks so that the seams would match up, but it wasn't perfect. Drat. Consider this entire quilt one whole humility block!

Trying to decide if I want a border or not. What do you think?