Summer Road Trip

After sharing my Homage quilt finish just a couple of weeks ago, it's almost inconceivable that I have another long-term finish to show already, but it's true! About the time I started in on quilting Homage, I sent my Summer Sampler quilt top off to be long-arm quilted. Wasn't that clever of me?

The Summer Sampler Road Trip hosted by Lee/Freshly Pieced, Faith/Fresh Lemons Quilts, and Katie/Swim Bike Quilt was announced back in April of last year, but the sewalong didn't actually start until mid-May, and then we sewed through September. [See links to all of my blocks at the end of this post.] You may remember that I was on the Design Team, and created the Milan block, inspired by the view from atop the Milan Cathedral during a trip to Milan, Italy.

For my blocks, I used a mix of prints from Carolyn Friedlander's collections, along with some Gleaned coordinating solids. For the filler blocks, I combined Kona Titanium, Pewter, Iron, Silver, and Shadow, following the original Summer Sampler plan for Hourglass blocks. Finally, come November, I had a finished quilt top!

Soooo. When it came time for quilting - remember I also had the Homage quilt to quilt - I decided to do myself a favor and get a little help. I delivered the 72" x 72" top, batt, and backing - a gray widescreen by Carolyn Friedlander - to Cindy Krafft of Cascadia Quilts.

The backing was an easy and obvious choice, since I had used so many of Carolyn's prints in my quilt blocks. Cindy was a member of Seattle MQG, and I had heard nice things about her quilting.

I really wanted the feature blocks of the quilt 'framed' and Cindy did that with some absolutely lovely straight-line quilting in the gray hourglass filler blocks. So as not to detract from the feature block designs, Cindy suggested stitch-in-the-ditch for them. The density contrast definitely is emphasized between the feature blocks and the filler blocks, which ended up resulting in a fairly supple quilt.

Two solid fabrics were used for the binding - primarily Kona Iron, with a length of Kona Shadow for a little contrast.

So my Summer Road Trip is complete! Sewing the blocks, being inspired by exotic places, was really alot of fun. And I'm super pleased with the finish. Can't ask for more than that!

Summer Road Trip

#summersampler2018 #aqtsummersampler

Week 18: Fish Rack   Week 17: Chrysler Building   Week 16: Moais

Week 15: Petra  Week 14: Pantheon   Week 13: Pisa

Week 12: Milan   Week 11: Under the Eiffel Tower  Week 10: Vatican

Week 9: Pagoda  Week 8: Castillo   Week 7: Half Timber

Week 6: Versailles  Week 5: Points  Week 4: Giza

Week 3: Southwest Highway  Week 2: Shenzhen  Week 1: Water Well

This project was on my 2019 Finish-A-Long Q1 List!
Linking up with the Finish-A-Long Q1 Finishes Link Up!