Finished yesterday, label added today.

Quilt Top

I’m please with how lively the quilt is and how the full and partial circles turned out. Not a usual layout for drunkard’s path blocks but one that works well with these fabrics – prints with an Asian/Japanese flavour. I like the contrast between the blacks/lights and brick fabrics. The dark border also helps the circles pop.

Quilt Back

For the back, I used blocks that didn’t quite make it up to size (most of the initial blocks) – I trimmed them by 1/4″ and was able to use them here. Notice, one circle just above the mid point, the rest of the blocks arrayed in one of the more traditional drunkard’s path layout.

To quilt my quilts I usually assemble the whole by pin basting, then stitching in the ditch along the block edges. This time, I stitched only around the border, leaving the pins in place while I quilted each block individually. Quilting this way covers any misalignment of the back strip with the columns on the top – that misalignment does show up if I’ve stitched in the ditch – I’m not usually out by much, maybe 1/2″ from top edge to bottom, but I can see that slightly off vertical line in the quilting on the back.

The design I created for this quilt aligned so the beginnings and ends of each embroidery link up and the whole looks as if I’d done the quilting edge to edge on a long-arm quilter (I’m getting better at this!). The border design is the same design, just downsized so I was able to stitch out two repeats using my grand endless hoop – that hoop makes the whole process go very quickly unlike having to individually hoop each of the 63 blocks in the quilt top. I was able to align each new start precisely with the ending of the previous stitch-out.

Quilt Detail

I chose a darker Sulky variegated thread for the border (darker than the thread I used for the blocks – a predominantly a brick colour) which still seemed too light, until I fancy stitched the binding in place using the brick coloured thread – that toned down the border quilting so you can see the design, but from a bit of a distance it doesn’t shout at you.

Started piecing the next quilt (I’d already cut the fabrics late last week). No name for this quilt yet.

This quilt will consist of three columns of black/white fabrics attached by the midline of the rich red Kona cotton background fabric. The arrangement of the strips will be different in each column. I can see I will need to do a bit of “fixing” near the top of this strip where the center line bows a wee bit to the left – the fix: to shave a bit off the bottom right of background strip #4 – that will straighten the strip.

The columns will be joined with sashing in the red solid fabric, the outer borders will also be 4″ of the red fabric (to match the 4″ top and bottom pieces for each column.

The back piecing? Haven’t thought about that yet!