What started as a "I'll just try one block" has now ended as a full lap quilt that will hopefully bring comfort to a young lady waiting for a new heart. Today I finished it.
That one block, quickly became two and ended up as 15. I was making them because I liked them. Until my sister-in-law told me about Chloe. It will be her who gifts this quilt. I originally thought I wouldn't be able to make this many blocks because I would be limited by my stash of text prints. In the end I had enough text but struggled to find fabrics that worked as the reels. Some of them are better than others!
For the front I added a Kona Black border to the mixtapes and then brought it up to size with the quilters' favourite Ikea print!
For the back I decided to piece a mega-sized mix tape - I upsized the original pattern and then rounded the numbers up and down so I wasn't cutting too many eighths of inches. It made my head hurt a little bit... but I'm glad I persevered and it was a great way of personalising the quilt.
But because I was so pleased with the back as well as the front I was loathe to quilt it because by doing what was right for the front of the quilt, I would "damage" the backing... In the end I decided to focus on the front and use light grey thread across the back in the hope that it blended in. I stitched in the ditch round the black border and the mixtapes, then created another border on the two widest Ikea borders, which I filled with free motion pebbles. You can just about see how lucky I was when I positioned it with no regard to the back - one side lines up with the pink/purple seam and the other with the purple/Ikea seam!
In the rest of the background I did half a cross-hatch. There was no way I was wrangling the quilt through the machine again to do the other direction... the black area caused me some bother. I had planned on more pebbles, but thread colour caused me some problems.
In an ideal world I would have used black thread on the top and kept with the light grey thread on the back. In the real world this resulted in black spots in the back and light grey spots on the front, quickly followed by the seam ripper. I didn't want to use black on the back as it would detract from the mega mix tape, and I didn't want to use light grey on the front as it would show up that my pebbles aren't the neatest. In the end I gave up on free motion quilting this section and dug out a nice bright pink perle thread and decided to quilt a single line both sides of the black border. I think it works though you can't really see it in this picture...or any of the pictures I took.
I actually bound it before I did the hand quilting: Kona black with a hint of Kona candy pink.
The fabrics in this quilt are many and varied. The big mix tape on the back is Kona in the following colours: candy pink, candy green, thistle, mulberry, regal. The reels are Tula Pink. On the front... Comma; Kaffe Fasset; Noteworthy; Happy Mochi Yum Yum; Dreamin' Vintage; Tula Pink, Kate Spain; Oval Elements; Architextures; Botanics; Cotton and Steel Basics; Rosalie Quinlan; a range of Kona solids and a bunch of other fabrics I can't remember. The final quilt is 60" x 60" before its washed. The pattern for the regular sized Mix-tapes is from Issue 10 of Love Patchwork and Quilting Magazine.
Can you believe - I even added a label!
This was my goal for October for A Lovely Year of Finishes
That one block, quickly became two and ended up as 15. I was making them because I liked them. Until my sister-in-law told me about Chloe. It will be her who gifts this quilt. I originally thought I wouldn't be able to make this many blocks because I would be limited by my stash of text prints. In the end I had enough text but struggled to find fabrics that worked as the reels. Some of them are better than others!
 |
| I had absolutely not intended the F to be visible! |
For the back I decided to piece a mega-sized mix tape - I upsized the original pattern and then rounded the numbers up and down so I wasn't cutting too many eighths of inches. It made my head hurt a little bit... but I'm glad I persevered and it was a great way of personalising the quilt.
But because I was so pleased with the back as well as the front I was loathe to quilt it because by doing what was right for the front of the quilt, I would "damage" the backing... In the end I decided to focus on the front and use light grey thread across the back in the hope that it blended in. I stitched in the ditch round the black border and the mixtapes, then created another border on the two widest Ikea borders, which I filled with free motion pebbles. You can just about see how lucky I was when I positioned it with no regard to the back - one side lines up with the pink/purple seam and the other with the purple/Ikea seam!
In the rest of the background I did half a cross-hatch. There was no way I was wrangling the quilt through the machine again to do the other direction... the black area caused me some bother. I had planned on more pebbles, but thread colour caused me some problems.
In an ideal world I would have used black thread on the top and kept with the light grey thread on the back. In the real world this resulted in black spots in the back and light grey spots on the front, quickly followed by the seam ripper. I didn't want to use black on the back as it would detract from the mega mix tape, and I didn't want to use light grey on the front as it would show up that my pebbles aren't the neatest. In the end I gave up on free motion quilting this section and dug out a nice bright pink perle thread and decided to quilt a single line both sides of the black border. I think it works though you can't really see it in this picture...or any of the pictures I took.
I actually bound it before I did the hand quilting: Kona black with a hint of Kona candy pink.
The fabrics in this quilt are many and varied. The big mix tape on the back is Kona in the following colours: candy pink, candy green, thistle, mulberry, regal. The reels are Tula Pink. On the front... Comma; Kaffe Fasset; Noteworthy; Happy Mochi Yum Yum; Dreamin' Vintage; Tula Pink, Kate Spain; Oval Elements; Architextures; Botanics; Cotton and Steel Basics; Rosalie Quinlan; a range of Kona solids and a bunch of other fabrics I can't remember. The final quilt is 60" x 60" before its washed. The pattern for the regular sized Mix-tapes is from Issue 10 of Love Patchwork and Quilting Magazine.
Can you believe - I even added a label!
This was my goal for October for A Lovely Year of Finishes
And was on my Quarter 4 Finish Along List.
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