I got totally involved in the Peter Rabbit quilt. I am doing this for a friend's mum and once I started, time just got away from me. Severely underestimated the time it would take to quilt this thing. It is a rather large quilt with half the blocks applique and half of them pieced. The amount of seams and outlining required is really quite insane. The quilt is a year long subscription to a patchwork magazine by Hatchette Partworks LTD. In their suggestions on how to quilt this, was one quilt where only the pieced blocks were quilted with a 1in grid and something in the border and then they got a version that has been done with an allover grid. While I liked the allover grid I realized that I could not do that on a sitdown longarm...too cumbersome with a quilt that size, so I started outlining everything.
But it's done and I am very happy with the result. I used 100wt Invisafil for this task and it gave me a really great finish. While the blocks have a number of imperfections, this quilt lies incredibly flat...really nice.
I was going to do some additional ruler work in the blocks however yesterday I did about four blocks only to realize that it does not add anything to this quilt, in fact, it looked slightly odd as the patterned fabric made the quilting disappear altogether, so I only had certain sections stand out. Initially I thought I could counteract this by restraining the quilting to the more solid looking fabric pieces but realized fairly soon that that was not going to work well. So I spent the rest of the day taking this out again! Another option, of course, would be to freemotion-quilt in the Peter Rabbit blocks and stitch down the off white background, however I am not sure it really needs that, as there is enough applique in the characters, so the blocks are stitched down nicely as they are. Also thinking that background quilting would make this very stiff and compact the whole thing too much (which would be an issue as the border already has a little bit too much fabric in there). So I am just going to work on the border now, probably doing some wavy feather spray in there.
Hopefully I will complete this by next week...always takes me a long time to work out how to fit my waves neatly in a border.
Watch this space!
Karin
Karin, I feel like I SPECIALIZE in underestimating how long it takes to quilt things! I feel for you! Your Peter Rabbit looks great. I learned a trick from Lisa Callie’s long arm workshop for figuring out the borders without measuring or math. She buys rolls of cash register receipt tape inexpensively from office supply stores. She cuts a piece off the length of each border, and then folds the paper in half, then fourths, then eighths, until she has a size that looks right for one “repeat” of her feather spine. Then she draws the curve on the top folded bit, cuts along the line with a paper scissors, and has a full size pattern of the entire feather spine for that border that she can use to mark the spine on the border. Hope that makes sense! Anyway, you’re doing a great job on this sweet quilt. Your friend’s mum did a beautiful job on her appliqué and she will be so thrilled with your quilting work!
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