It’s Show Time!

Once again, it’s time for the Blogger’s Quilt Festival.  And I’m excited to participate again … with my chevron quilt.  If you remember, there was a bit of an uproar last spring when originally there wasn’t going to be a Hand Quilting category … since I had been one (of many) who’d beseeched Amy to include a Hand Quilting category, I felt a bit of an obligation to participate … and even though we were on vacation and even though I had limited number of photographs to include, I did.  I didn’t win anything (I didn’t expect to), but I enjoyed the process so much that I’m entering the Fall Festival. 



I expected to hate this quilt.  After all, I don’t do gray, I don’t do solids, there were a couple of last minute design changes, and I had nothing but trouble with this quilt:  broken and skipped stitches during the piecing, triangle points that wouldn’t cooperate, a whole lot of frog stitching, extra-wide backing fabric that shrank 10% and had to be pieced (not to mention a wait for the replacement backing fabric).  Had this quilt not been for my daughter and son-in-law, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have just scrapped it all in frustration!  But when I was done, I was surprised to see how much I loved this quilt … no, it’ll never be a favorite (after all, I don’t do gray or solids ), but I ended up being especially pleased with how it turned out.

DD chose two shades of Kona gray (Steel and Silver) for a herringbone quilt she pinned on Pinterest.  Here’s the inspiration.
In order to make the quilt large enough to fit their large queen-sized bed, I knew I’d have to cut a lot of HSTs.  I chose to make them 6” finished so that I could use my cutter.  Even with large HSTs, I still had to cut 512 HSTs … can you imagine cutting 512 HSTs with a rotary cutter?   


After I’d cut the HSTs, DD decided that she wanted a chevron quilt, instead of the herringbone.  Thankfully, she decided while I was piecing the HSTs into squares which meant that all I had to do was change the setting from herringbone to chevron.  She also asked for borders, so I chose Kona Pepper for the small inner border and finished with a wider border in the Kona Steel used to make the chevrons.

I’d never been so glad to get a top ready to sandwich and baste as I was this quilt … of course, it was large enough that I had to get a third folding table to be able to lay it out properly for basting.  It took me 11 weeks to reach that stage … but in my defense, I had a two-week vacation, a four-day retreat, and plenty of swim meets/time with my favorite people in those 11 weeks. 

And then came the fun part … the hand quilting.  DD wanted a simple quilting design, something that would accentuate the geometric pattern.  I used YLI 40/3 hand quilting thread in a medium gray.






It took me 4 weeks to quilt this … I didn’t realize, until just now, that it took me almost three times as long to piece this as it did to quilt it.  Granted, there were plenty of road blocks to the piecing … while the hand quilting went fairly quickly since hand quilting is my favorite part of quiltmaking … and the quilting pattern was simple.



Details:
Finished size: 99”x99”
Fabrics: Kona Steel, Kona Silver and Kona Pepper (top); Moda Bella Gray 108” (backing)
Thread: YLI 40/3 Gray
Machine pieced and hand quilted
Time: April 27, 2014 – August 19, 2014
Category: Hand Quilted