Well here it is - my first quilt finish of the year! This is the Skill Builder block of the month, which was run by Pile O'Fabric back in 2013.
I started this quilt on 17th January 2013 and the last time I touched this project (according to my blog) was April 2014. I had to give my study a good tidy over Christmas and came across the blocks I'd made and was surprised how much I'd already done. I packed it away again, finished tidying, moved on. But those blocks kept coming back to mind so I dug them back out. I even managed to find the box of fabrics I'd carefully curated all those years ago - wow there were some treasures in there!
I worked out that if I was content with a 16-block layout, instead of the originally planned 20-block layout, and if I was happy to use the "spare" block created by one of the techniques, I only needed to piece two more. So I did. Both were foundation pieced:
Then all the blocks needed to be quilted - I hadn't made as much progress on this particular element of the quilt - looking back at my blog posts from 2013, it seems I was having issues with my machine not wanting to behave when free motion quilting, so there was lots to do. The quilt is constructed using a quilt-as-you technique, which meant it was much easier to do intricate and interesting quilting on each block without struggling to manoeuvre the whole quilt through the machine. Here are some of my favourites:
I have to confess that some of the quilting decisions on the last few blocks were influenced by the lack of thread on the reel (and no more grey in my thread stash)!
I backed each block with a different fat quarter from my 10-years-ago stash, and then joined the blocks by sewing them right sides together through all layers, adding a binding strip into the seam, then hand sewing down the binding.
It took a bit of time, but the pay-off for being able to easily do more intricate quilting was worth it. And the back looks pretty too.
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