Tag: Finished Quilt Top

Tradewinds….the big finish!!

On Thursday, I left you with the quilt at this stage…..

As I looked at it, I felt that it needed some separation between the blocks so decided to add 1-inch sashing.

….and the blue background seemed to be a perfect choice.

Before I started pulling blocks off of the design wall, I added numbered pins to each block which GREATLY helped to keep the blocks in the same place as piecing commenced…..

If you are interested, here is an older video that I made reviewing one of the Numbered Pin brands…..

I quickly had the horizontal sashing added…..

Now came the hard part….. adding the vertical sashing and making sure that the blocks were perfectly lined up!!

I accomplished this by marking registration lines on the sashing piece and pinning every seam so that they matched….

The top was finished, including the 1-inch sashing around the entire top. Now I wanted to add a splash of color to the border. As I searched my stash, my eyes fell on these fabrics…..

After lots of trial and error, I ended up cutting strips from several of these and piecing them together into irregular-sized chunks.

A final blue border and the top was finished…..

And, I LOVE IT!!!

I am not interested in quilting this myself so have sent it off to let Sheila work her magic with thread.

Just because I am not quilting this myself doesn’t mean that I couldn’t quilt it if I had the time…..

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What was I thinking?

Since I had finished “Bridge Over the River KEW“, it was time to turn back to the Color Wheel quilt that I have been slowly working on for the past YEAR!!!

Now that the hand applique on the corner’s were finished I needed to turn these five pieces into one very BIG piece…..

I had been dreading this part of the process since it would be extremely easy to get the triangles off center and then the whole thing would be skewed. When doing the corner design I had marked all of the sewing lines, so it was easy to match those lines up, iron a crease where the sewing line would go and then simply sew along the marked line….

After the initial sewing, I laid the top out on the floor and used the laser square to see how close it was….

There was one corner that needed some work…..

….but a bit of ripping and re-sewing soon had that fixed.

The bottom line is that the final trim will be very close but I will get it quilted and then see where it is.

Next I needed to make a back for the quilt and at this point I started asking myself exactly what I was thinking when I designed this quilt and WHY did I make it so big!!!

It was fun using a number of multi-colored pieces of fabric for the back…..

…..especially the cute psychedelic VW Bug fabric!!

So for now, I will put this into the line-up for quilting….it is number three in the queue.