String Tulips Flimsy

My queen sized version of the AHIQ String Tulip QAL is a finished top! I love it and I'm so glad Ann shared her instructions for this fun project. 

It turned out a lot more green than I expected, lol. The background fabric is green and yellow on white, so I thought it would read more white than it does. It's good, though, I'm so over that low volume phase from a few years ago. I look at some of those UFOs and I have no motivation to finish them.

The red diamond shape around the center was not strictly pre-planned. While I was assembling the string blocks I thought a diagonal line would be useful in the outer border. But as soon as I started laying it out the diamond in the inner border was obviously the way to go.

It's quite large, about 224 cm (88") square. I'm going to do another wide binding since I really like how the binding on Picnic turned out. This one will be scrappy reds using the fabrics in the tulips. For the quilting I'm thinking a leafy panto will look good. 

So yay, another one assembled! These large quilts are definitely what i enjoy the most. I started a wall quilt after finishing Picnic and I had to cut it short because I really wasn't enjoying it. I need a bigger sandbox to play in. 😁

Next up will be the border for Rose Boll. I had to pull it out to make sure my red binding fabrics for the tulips weren't needed on that (they weren't), and I finally decided what to do there. More strings! 🤣

Happy quilting everyone ❤

Finished Picnic!

Finally 😂

I think this top went together very quickly and easily, but then it took forever to quilt and bind. It's the largest quilt I've finished, so that's probably why the learning curve was so high. It's about 218 x 234 cm, 86" x 92".

I named it Picnic because I used up several old food-themed novelty fabrics, as well as some printed ginghams. My design was inspired by pictures I'd seen of a quilt by Sujata Shah in her book Cultural Fusion Quilts. I've blogged about that before here.

Because it's so large I took it to a DIY longarm, but that didn't go well. Eventually I decided to do an all over stipple on my home machine. It was heavy work but I'm satisfied with the result. Hopefully now that I've learned i can quilt a few more the same way.

I also cut two different bindings for the quilt, but it's been so long that I don't even remember what I thought the issue was! Anyway this turquoise one seemed fine when I looked at it this week so I just went ahead with it. It's almost an inch wide, 2+ cm, which surprised me! But I'm just assuming it was a design choice and I think it works fairly well. 😉

Everything is machine stitched because my hand sewing situation is not much improved. 

Anyway I'm very glad to have it done and I plan to put it to use right away! And I'm on a binding blitz right now so I hope to have a few more small finishes to share soon.

Happy stitching everyone! And one more photo for the road...