Catching Up

I have been very negligent on keeping up on my blog, but I HAVE been sewing/quilting almost every day.  I will try to bring you up to date on my activity.

Taking up most of my time this past month has been the finishing of Doug and Gina's Four Winds quilt. The piecing of this beautiful quilt has been done for a year or more, but I just haven't had the heart to finish it.  But I've decided it's time to GET ON WITH IT!  So I started to work on it again.

Here is the backing fabric.  A blue/purple leafy batik.  Perfect.  It is one solid piece of fabric.  I ironed it before I made the sandwich. This is the first time I ever ironed a backing fabric, and I will continue to do this in the future.  It really made a big difference in the smoothness of the quilt back.

The "Pinning"!  This quilt measures 80" x 80" so it fit nicely on my kitchen floor.  Pinning is my least favorite part of the quilt-making process.  Hard on the knees, so I use a kneeling pad, which helps a lot.  I always feel this the next day in my muscles too.  Lots of stretching.  Pinning a quilt is good exercise!

This turned out to be a very heavily quilted quilt.  I didn't actually mean for it to be that way, but once I got started, it just seemed to NEED to be that way.  I have spirals meandered in, merged in with free motion swirls to show wind. This quilt needs some wind (it's called The Four Winds after all!) to clear the air and blow away any negativity.  I have "clouds" free motioned in with echoed "hops".  I like the way this quilt turned out.  Here is some detail of the quilting:

  

I have it totally quilted and bound now.  The binding fabric is a deep blue/purple batik, I think it goes perfectly with both sides of the quilt.  I have taken this quilt to my Quilt Guild meeting as a show and tell.  It got a lot of oooohs and ahhhhhhs!  Take a look at the finished quilt:

 

Doug and Gina are gonna LOVE this!  (I hope.)