Finished the quilt yesterday – at least for the moment I’m considering the quilt done. I’m still contemplating quilting the seams in the ditch but pressing has flattened the 6-point joins reasonably well – I may leave well enough alone.

Finished size: 47″ x 66″.

It’s hard to see in the photo but I finished with a 1/4″ binding using what scraps I could scrounge from the backing cut-offs (it was close – I have nothing left over!). In this case I stitched the binding to the front, hand stitched on the back (I usually stitch a binding to the back, fold over, and use a decorative stitch on the front). Stitching to the front with this quilt made sure I had an even 1/4″ dark edge to the quilt top.

This is the seventh quilt finished since last August – I have time to work on one more for the showing in Parrsboro, scheduled to happen through July this summer. I have more than enough of the Kaffe Fassett Collective fabric to work with – no point in saving it because I have more KFC fabric ordered to arrive sometime in June.

I signed up for the July/August “Kaffe Quilt Along – Gathering No Moss” online workshop being offered through Hyggeligt Fabrics in St. Mary’s ON. It was the colour of the blue collection that caught my eye. I don’t expect I will construct the suggest quilt – if I do work on that quilt block, I won’t make it using just those fabrics – the blues need some kind of an accent to liven the array. I registered because I’m interested in seeing what Fassett has to say about choosing colour and planning layout.

I knew of Kaffe Fassett’s work through his knitting books and even tried a couple of his sweaters – first time I tried intarsia knitting (not my favourite kind of knitting – too fiddly).

Then I as a novice quilter I came across the You Tube videos of his Tampa weekend workshop Oct 17/18 2008.

I watched all three sessions and learned a lot about colour flow. (Here is another video where he discusses colour.)

Over the next year or two I did a series of quilts with batiks (as well as large scale print fabrics) using what I’d picked up from watching the workshop videos. So I’m curious to see what he will have to say this time as people work through four different colour arrangements of the designated quilt.

I just finished quilting all ~135 diamonds (I haven’t actually counted them). It took me four days to stitch/embroider all the diamonds – somewhere in the vicinity of 16 hours.

Yesterday I learned two new things.

First – I use the Precise Positioning feature on my Pfaff Icon embroidery machine – however, in all these years I’ve been quilting my quilts I’ve used the left/right up/down feature but except when I was learning what Precise Positioning could do, I have never used the rotate feature! This set of diamonds and positioning a design within each block required I also rotate the design slightly to make sure the end of the design finished in the right position.

Second – When I’m quilting, I bring the bottom thread to the top before I start stitching. Sometimes when the machine starts the top thread gets pulled beneath the quilt sandwich, often leaving a bit of a bird’s nest below. Yesterday, I found out why that was happening! I discovered when I bring the bottom thread to the top, I have to make sure the needle position is rotated past the highest point. If I’m careful about that, my top thread stays where it is.

There are lots of things you can’t tell from the photo which looks a lot busier than the quilt does “in person”. You can’t see that I change thread for each block to minimize the impact of the quilting. You can’t see that I’ve embedded all thread ends from the start and stop of each embroidery. You do see the overall effect of the precise positioning of each quilting embroidery.

I still have the edge half-diamonds at the top and bottom to quilt, as well as the triangles along each side. I’ll get to that tomorrow; it won’t take long. Then, as I did on the Diamonds II quilt, I will stitch in the ditch over the entire quilt to give definition to each diamond/cube.

Still lots of work to do here.

I did a bit of searching before starting to sew my diamonds together – I wanted to see how people generally stitch their diamonds/cubes/hexagons together for the Tumbling Blocks design. The cube/hexagon, as I learned with the previous quilt, is created using Y-seams with three diamonds. I’m getting relatively good at that, so that wasn’t my question – I wanted to know how people put the cubes together. Turns out they do what you’d expect – create each cube then butt the blocks together, but most of them are working with three fabrics (a dark, medium, light) and it’s possible to start in the centre of the project and work your way out from there.

My challenge is each cube/hexagon is unique and I want a specific colour flow. The way to assemble the quilt top, I thought, was to carefully stack the diamonds in each cube keeping it in its exact row; stitch each cube, stitch each row, then join the rows to one another.

TOO FIDDLY!

I created rows 1 & 2 separately, and managed to join them, but getting the “star” joins, involving six points, took a great deal of time, and a lot of picking out of stitching, to get the points to match precisely. So that’s not the way to do this!

How else might I assemble sub units so I can join them with less effort?

I realized, as I was sewing row 2 to row 1, that if I set up half-star units, I might be able to get the 6-point join to work more easily.

In this layout I have two “simple” Y-joins at each end of the star with the 6-point join in the centre of a long flat seam, rather than struggling with two Y-seams to make that 6-point connection.

I’ve laid out the rest of row #3 that way, and I’ll sew it tomorrow.

I still have to work with my carefully stacked rows of cubes – but before sewing cubes, I will lay out each row as half-stars, join those units, then connect them to the rest of the quilt top.

Let you know how well that works, tomorrow!

I’ve just laid out the second pile of diamonds from the Kaffe Fassett Collective. I’d cut them from the strips I’d cut for Diamonds II and added a few more from fabrics I picked up at Woolworks just outside of Mahone Bay when I was in Lunenburg for my regular bone density scan.

I began by colour sorting the diamonds then sorting again for intensity. I laid out the blocks so I could get a colour flow from the yellows in the top left to blues in the bottom right. I haven’t taken time yet to sit with this array – I did my best to keep the dark diamonds aligned on one side of each “cube”, lighter diamonds on the “light side” with a medium intensity for the “top” of each cube. I now need to spend some time checking that the flow allows each cube to stand out.

In actual fact I began the layout with the blue diamonds (in part because I had more blues than other colours) but once I had the layout I decided the colour flow works better from the yellow to the blue, rather than the other way around.

So now to begin assembling the quilt top.