The Ugly Duckling Quilt is Finished

Happy New Year to everyone.

Christmas certainly was a busy time but I managed to finish a few things.

First at all, let me show you another bucket hat I made as a Christmas present

I took my time with this hat and hand-basted the seams before I actually took it to the machine. Worked a treat...no puckers, came out fantastic and was well received. Used some of the Bali fabric that I acquired on my trip last year.

I did some more work on my rather intensive background filler project but it was slow going. Partly because I need to preserve my shoulder but also because it just did not want to flow. Made some in-road though with stubborn day-today stitching and am hoping that it will be a bit easier from now on.

To give myself a little break I continued on the Ugly Duckling quilt, so named because I am not really a fan of soft pinks and the layout was just very simple to use up some scraps.

Bit hard to see because of the soft colours, here is another close up shot

I quilted this with a very soft apricot 50/2 Aurifil thread. First did the ruler work in the squares using Bethanne Nemesh Lilac Lines rulers that has an S-curve on the end. Lots of fun. After that I thought the sashing needed a bit more pizzaz so I put a chain of pearls in there. And then I stuffed up the border a bit...haha.  Had done the spine for the feathers before Christmas, ready to go, only to realise after that my spine was about 1/4in off center for the way I was going to quilt the feathers. I had cut my border 4-1/2in. Did not help that I changed my mind how I wanted to quilt the feathers, i.e. having them fill the entire space. Took me a few days to think this through and in the end I just cut off 1/4in off the border to have the feathers exactly in the middle. Anyway, was great to do some feathers again...I tried to do pretty informal feathers which I find incredibly hard to do. These are continuous type feathers which for a truly informal look would need to have a little bit more spacing in between. While that was the idea I only managed that in a couple of spaces. Its funny with the muscle memory...I have done continuous feathers for a long time and am really used to making them look like almost the bump back heirloom style feathers. To change that is obviously very difficult for me. But still looks pretty good...I threw in a few embellishments and did the heart shaped elongated plume in between just enough to make it a bit more interesting. Looks great. On a side note...I managed to hit 5 million stitches on my Q20 over Christmas which is about 1,250000 stitches per year. Not bad.

I chose a stripey binding and followed a little trick on how to match the stripes when joining your binding outlined in Bethanne Nemesh' Bitty Binding booklet. Worked fantastic and all my stripes matched, even when joining the binding in the end.

Really happy with this little quilt. Just had a look over my blog. This is the third quilt I managed to get out of a fat quarter bundle which is called Foxglove Gardens by Leanne Beasley for Ella Blue fabrics and part of a promise to myself for this year to use up my leftover fabrics and scraps. Apart from the backing I had all the materials at hand. Because of the colours I went on a hunt for a nice backing and fell in love with this fabric

The fabric is from the Fiore Collection produced by Maya Ootani for Handworks Fabric (printed in Japan). Not my usual colour but it matched just so perfectly and is really good quality.

So, with this done, I will need to make another list of tasks to work out what comes next. For the remainder of the week I am aiming to 

- continue on my background filler project, i.e. complete at least one more section of the quilt

- baste one of the charity quilts ready for quilting

- watch one of the Lisa Calle's Design Society videos to find out about the challenge for the new year.

- make a list of the order that I want projects to be completed as there is a lot going on in my head at the moment.

Linking up to To Do Tuesday #107 over at Quilt Schmilt

 

Karin