Quilt Quest 2013 - The Build Up

Last year I participated in my very first shop hop.  I was so excited to go to all the shops, buy all the fun fabrics, pick up the free patterns and get my passport stamped.  I spent hundreds of dollars.  That shop hop was the Quilters' Quest 2013 Shop Hop.  Ten days to get to ten shops.  I managed it in three days.  It was a long weekend.  I loved every bit of it.

Ultimately, I picked the great quilt from Capital Quilts as my favorite.  I bought the setting kit and started working on the over 300 half-square triangle blocks needed to make this quilt.  I will admit, I played with layout a little.

Step one in any project:  Make a mess.  Since this one started with stacks of 5" charms I had to make all those HST blocks and then square them up.  Not my best squaring as this was long before I got my Tucker Trimmer.

Layout was back-breaking work.  Some day I will stop crawling around on my floor and get a design wall.

I did the layout and sewing in sections.  It took days.  I let the finished top sit and sit until I was ready to quilt it.  I'm still not sure how I feel about my choice for backing fabric, but there's no changing it now.

I couldn't decide on a single color for quilting, so I just grabbed a bunch that I thought would work.  I didn't get all of these into the quilting, but I did give it a good try.  I'll get an official count of the number of thread colors I used at some point.

I tried to use different motifs throughout the quilt.

I'm not going to say I didn't repeat any, because I totally did.

I'm just saying that I quilted it differently as much as I could.

The number of thread changes was another thing I didn't keep track of.

The different areas challenged me to keep things different and maintain some continuity.  I worked on the quilting for this quilt over the course of two weeks.  I didn't quilt every day, but if I did quilt it was for two or more hours.  I'll keep better track, next time.  For now, I'm going to guess that I put in something like 10-15 hours quilting it.  It may not be perfect, but it looks great and I did it.