Quilt Quest 2013 - The Big Finish

Yes, yes, I know.  Monday was a big tease.  You'll get over it.  This is the big finish for my Quilters' Quest quilt from 2013.  The pattern is from Capital Quilts.

All that quilting took ages and ages to finish.  Feathers and swirls.  Ruler-work and free-motion.  All of it is in there.  I love every stitch of it.  It spent two weeks on the long arm frame with me working on it after work.  Did I mention it took ages?

Over the weekend, we went camping and I had some time to finish the binding and take some pictures of the (mostly) finished quilt.

The binding was made using four fat quarters from Jinny Beyer Studios.  I bought this fabric during the Quilters' Quest Shop Hop.  It is scrappy and wonderful.

I love the back almost as much as the front.  No forgotten orphan blocks, just a plain purple fabric.  I'm torn between wishing I'd used a busier background and the fact that you can see the quilting.

I did get a couple pictures at one of the local state parks but it was before I finished the binding.  Now I have to come up with a name for this beauty and get a label stitched on.

If you're over in my part of the country come November, you should totally check out the Quilters' Quest Shop Hop.  It's fun and you can go on an adventure to new quilt shops.

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.