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First finish of 2011, I hope there are many more!


I call it "Welcome Spring"


After that awful cold snap we had here in DFW, I think I wanted something really bright and cheerful. It's 22 inches square, thankfully. I don't think I could stomach these two colors together if it was much larger. This is a good representation of the colors. The blocks are each 6 inches finished. It's basically a sample to try out my new Tri-Recs rulers. I free motion quilted it with Connecting Threads' Essentials in Purple.

In my last post I shared my ideas for the quilting in the snowball blocks. I pinned the papers to the quilt and stitched through them over my design. Then I had to pull off the paper, which actually took longer than the quilting.



The tracing paper was OK but stiffer than I'd have liked. I'm going to swipe some deli paper from the grocery store to try that out next. If it tears better than I'm going to buy a box of it.

The center motif:


The other blocks had this design


I then stitched pumpkin seeds along the chains the four patches made and the border and quilted spirals in the corners. Here's the back














I thought it may have needed more quilting in the corners of the snowball blocks but some higher power thought otherwise:



That length of thread that is highlighted by the arrow is what was left of the bobbin when I finished stitching the last line. It was just enough to bury in the layers so I decided that was the hint that the job was done.

I'm excited and ready to make a larger version of this combination of blocks. I think the "curves" will look more curve-like in a bigger version & not so straight. But first, I have to catch up with my Block of the Month and I finally found a pattern I might use for some fabric I didn't know what to do with because the pattern was so big. Plus, there's a quilt-as-you-go method I need to sample to possibly use for my block of the month. Wow, I have more to do than I thought!

Comments

  1. Oh I really love this bright quilt. I agree that much bigger would be too much for the eyes, but you did this fantastically - the colors, the quilting! I'll have to try something like you did for the tracing paper and inkscape, I keep forgetting to mark my quilting lines before I try FMQ. Sometimes that's okay, and sometimes, it doesn't turn out. I'll have to be on the lookout for deli paper too!

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