Finally Finished!

Black, White and Read All Over, 64" x 64"

Edward's quilt is finally finished! Started in November 2010, the flimsy was finished and the quilt was basted in 2012. I started the quilting on my old machine, which had to be taken for repair and cleaning twice during the process. And it still wasn't until I got my new machine this spring that I managed to finish the quilting.

It is straight line quilted:

I like quilting double lines like this, because it fools the eye into thinking the lines are straighter than they are!

In the close up you can see that all the fabrics have some kind of kanji script, either real or imaginary. So theoretically, you could "read" the quilt. Hence the title:

You can see the label was optimistically stitched in 2012, lol! The design is from Carrie Nelson's Schnibbles Times Two book. She sews the label to the back before it is quilted, which I tried here as well. I worried about it catching during the machine quilting, but it didn't. With all the problems I did have on this quilt, the label wasn't one of them.

The backing is a new flannel sheet that I got on sale. It really was too heavy for my old machine, but the new machine handled it fine. I like the masculine Buffalo check!

So, Edward's quilt is my second finished flimsy, and my second finished quilt. While we were out taking photos, I took a better picture of Nine Patch Jubilee as well. That was my third finished flimsy, and first finished quilt:

Where is flimsy number one, you ask? LOL. Packed away. Maybe I will get it out some day, maybe not.

Anyway, it feels great to finally have this one done. I even have a 3" scar on my forearm from one of the basting pins that came open when I started the quilting in 2012! But it's fading...

Best of all, now I have room for a new project in my sewing area! Home Sweet Home will get the nod, I think.

Housekeeping

I'm claiming my blog on Bloglovin, at last:

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I've had the Bloglovin button for followers in my sidebar for about a year, but I'm finally making the switch myself to use it as my main blog reader instead of the Blogger dashboard. The dashboard reader has been very unreliable lately, some posts have been late or missing. And the Bloglovin reader is very clean and easy to use, with nice large photos (the most important part!).

Otherwise, it's been a steady stream of birthdays and holidays all spring, plus several trips to the garden centre, so I haven't done much sewing lately.

And, I finally got rid of my guild's historic archives, which were stored in my basement for the past two years. Now, though, I have no more excuses to avoid cleaning out a lot of my own old stuff, so I hope to do that in stages over the summer as well.

On a side note, one interesting offshoot of my effort to use more purple in my projects is that I've become obsessed with purple flowers this spring! These Johnny Jump Ups, or small pansies, seed themselves between our patio stones every year:

They look a little worn, but the colours are inspiring!

Back to stitching soon! :D

Snowberry, Part 1

In early January, while I was busy with my little Highlands Houses project, the 80th issue of Inspirations magazine finally arrived at my house. I'd begun to think it had been lost, because it must have been two months in transit.

I was immediately enamoured of Yvette Stanton's Snowberry biscornu, which uses a variety of traditional Mountmellick stitches on white jean fabric. I realized that I could adapt it to my current needs with supplies that I already had on hand, and I started it right away!

I wanted a general purpose pincushion to replace this poor chicken, which I bought to support Quilts of Valour at the Trenton quilt show a few years ago. Somehow I always feel bad about sticking needles in animal-shaped pincushions! But, he has been extremely helpful, because the fabric is loose enough to hold both embroidery and tapestry needles.

I didn't have any Mountmellick thread or white jean in my stash, but I did have some leftover pieces of 28 ct flax-coloured Cashel linen, and a ball of No. 8 perle cotton in ecru, which I thought might work instead. I stabilized the loose Cashel linen with a knitted polyester fusible interfacing, which has been working very well.

I like that my old chicken is fairly compact and doesn't take up a lot of space on my side table while I sew. That's prime real estate! So I reduced the Snowberry biscornu design on my photocopier from 4 3/4" down to exactly 4". While I was at it I changed the number of berries from five to three, to make the whole thing more symmetrical:

I drew my changes right onto the photocopy with a pencil, and then fiddled around erasing and re-drawing until I was happy with the layout. Then I re-drew the final outline with a Sharpie. Sharpie ink seeps through to the back and gives a clean outline to trace onto the fabric. No one will ever know that it is a mirror image of the original!

With the loose weave of the Cashel linen and the dark lines from the Sharpie, I didn't even need a light box to trace the pattern onto the fabric. I traced first with a pencil, and then again with the blue water-erasable pen to give a clear line. I hate it when the lines disappear while I'm stitching!

Then I jumped right in! The flowers in the first picture were pretty straightforward, stem stitch and padded satin stitch. The berries were a little different for me, though. Some of the French knots in the centres have eight wraps! I think they would look better in proper Mountmellick thread, which makes a smooth knot. But overall, I like the way the flax linen and ecru perle cotton look together:

At this point I had to stop, because the edges were fraying and my sewing machine was then in the shop. So I packed it away until recently. But now I'm making progress again. One set of leaves is outlined with Cable Plait Stitch, which is a bit of a stinker. I'll talk about that next time!