A good looking beast

I joined a quilt-along last winter to make a scrappy Swoon (a particular quilt pattern). I decided to use the 5” squares that I had already cut out, to go along with the spirit of “use what you have” mentality that I’m attempting to have this year. (Seeing that it’s now September, I can honestly say that it’s been going well. Not 100%, but good enough for me>)

Anyway, I had the quilt about half way done when I traveled to Idaho for my grandmother’s funeral. When I was there, I visited my Aunt’s house and I saw that the colors I had picked for this quilt would go perfectly with the colors in her house. Perfect!   I  finished the quilt in February (I think), but was quite intimidated to quilt it. It was much larger than I had anticipated, ending up to be 95” x 95”. I only have a domestic machine, albeit a higher end one, and quilting something that large was making me quite nervous. So I did what any good quilter does with such a problem.

I shelved the quilt.

All Spring and Summer long.

During the month of  August, my mother bought a house here in Crandon, and it was decided that I would fly out to Idaho again, to help drive the moving truck with her back home here. That gave me the deadline to finish this quilt, so I could give it to her in person.

And so I picked a nice day to baste the quilt outside on 3 folding tables. It took about an hour.

I went back and forth of how to quilt this thing. Do I do simple strait line quilting to (maybe) save time or do I take extra time and custom quilting it? I finally decided to do what I really want to do: custom quilt it. I knew that if I did anything else, I wouldn’t be happy with it.

So at the beginning of September, about 2 1/2 weeks before I flew out, I started quilting it. They are fairly simple designs, and fairly large since this is a large quilt.

The pink and red center "star" I quilted with a flower pattern, similar to Stitched In Color’s mum quilting. The low volume triangles around the "star" I quilted in a fairly tight stipple.

In the blue sections, I quilted "modern clam shells", a motif from Free Motion Quilting with Angela Walters.

In the brown I quilted "pulleys", a quilting motif from Free Motion Quilting with Angela Walters. And the low volume triangles around the edges, I quilted in a cross hatch pattern.

Here is the back. My Aunt loves owls, so in keeping with the spirit of "using what I have", I treated pieces of white fabric with Bubble Jet Set 2000 and printed out 6 different owl coloring pages onto the treated fabrics (Caleb was too young to color at the time and Samuel wasn’t born yet). I then gave permanent markers to the children and told them to color the "pages" however they wanted. Once the coloring was done and the "pages" were set, I pieced them with the children’s favorite colors. I appliqued the large owl so I was able to get my own owl on there, too.

Here is Maacah’s block. I really love how the quilting shows up on this black!

Here is Grace’s block. I didn’t have enough solid pink to make her block, so I used a pink print on pink.

Here is Isaac’s block.

Here is Malachi’s block. It looks a bit grey in this picture, but it’s actually green.

Here is Nathaniel’s block. You can see the clam shell quilting here very well.

Here is Damaris’s block. She is 3 and I think she did quite a good job!

Here is my "block". I appliqued this onto the blue fabric, fusing it with heat n’ bond, then sewed it to the other colored squares.

When I gave it to her, she was so surprised! She said that she has been wanting to replace her old quit. I’m glad she didn’t!!

Here is a view of the back again.

Here is the binding, a red tone on tone.

Now it’s in its new home!! I like how she is using the back for the front!

And I’m glad to get this WIP off my list!

Linking up with Quilt Story – fabric Tuesday and Amanda Jean’s “Finish it up Friday”.