Confectionery

After all that talk about taking your finished quilt out into the world for a snazzy photoshoot, I really struggled to make this one happen. Basically, due to the size of the quilt (80"x80"), it was too wide for either hubby or I to hold out straight, so we had a grand plan to use the new photographer's background stand that I'd gotten for Christmas. That was a good news/bad news plan that I'll tell you more about later, but let's just say things didn't go as we'd anticipated. Anyway, on with the story....

This quilt which I've dubbed "Confectionery" has been in the making for over 12 months! That's way longer than I usually spend on one quilt, but when it's a block-of-the-month, that's what you do! This BOM with SMQG was unique in a variety of ways":

• Rather than make a standard block quilt, we started last January by each making a 12.5" unfinished block of our own choosing. 
• Each of the following eight months, a quilt member would design and post a new border. 
• Then for the last three months of the year, as I've mentioned before, I posted finishing technique round ups for the group. 

Overall I really enjoyed making this quilt, though before long I started to seriously doubt my fabric choices. Not that I didn't like them all. I did, alot. But this riot of color on such a large scale overwhelmed me! I persevered, though, and I'm glad I did. I had pulled as much as I could from my stash of prints by Alison Glass, using a variety of low-volume prints as the backgrounds of each border. 

For the backing, I echoed two elements from the front - the churn dash center (etc. etc.), and the 'brick' border. I pretty much figured it out as I went, and have been asked to go into more detail about that, so I hope to also do that in a separate post soon.

Honestly, I wasn't in the mood at that point to do a complicated quilting pattern. My original thought was a diagonal grid, but after marking and sewing just a few lines, I realized I didn't want to go that route, specifically the marking part. Rather, I unpicked and restarted in the center, doing a square spiral using seam-lines as guides and sewing 1" to 1 1/2" apart, depending on each border. I can't say it's overly impressive, but it did the job, works with the quilt design, and I survived to tell about it.

For binding, I used the text print from Alison Glass' Sun Print and Carrie Bloomston's Collage newsprint stripe. My intent was to echo the pair of dark purple corner borders within the quilt, but neither my fabric choice nor the width of the binding contributed to pulling that off. Oh well, I know the little detail is there. 

So mission accomplished. Whew. And I did get to spend a nice afternoon at the beach.

This finish is on my Q1 FAL list! Oh joy.
Linking up with Fabric Tuesday.