Florida Quilt

Timing is everything...

I'm happily writing this post to coincide with the 2016 Blogger's Quilt Festival hosted by Amy's Creative Side and my entry - Florida - into the Home Machine Quilted category. Though to be honest, it was tough choosing the right category for Florida, which also fits Small Quilts, Modern Quilts, and Original Design.

So... presenting Florida. It measures 39" wide by 38" high and is made with lots of 1-1/2" X 1-1/2" solid fabric half-square triangles, and an ocean background of Grunge Ocean.

I domestic machine quilted Florida on my Janome 1600P using 50-weight Aurifil on the top and in the bobbin. The top color was aqua #5005, and the bobbin was light blue #2805.

  
Swirly quilting includes designs of snail trails, "C's", paisleys, bubbles, and swooping lines to get the effect of a tumultuous ocean.

While the quilting went along quickly, what I didn't enjoy was that by starting the free motion quilting in the middle, along the Gulf side of the land, I worked in a tuck as I quilted to the west, and then to the north toward the peninsula. Darn. Right away I unstitched quite a bit.

iPhone photo - Look how blue the water looks!

Then I straight-pinned the sandwich and quilted from the peninsula toward the south, working out the extra fullness. By now I should know that double-batting makes shifting more likely, and that I must be extra careful about where I begin quilting, no matter how many safety pins I use to keep the layers from shifting.

Canon Powershot S100 photo - This is the truer Grunge Ocean color.

All that unquilting made for lots of starts and stops to fill back in what I'd just taken out. That meant lots of thread-burying. It's an easier task when I use a Sench needle. I've recently starting using this needle which has a little slot along the side of the eye, for slipping thread up, then down into position. I'm a big fan. Sench needles are available from this Etsy Shop - DragonflyQuiltworks, here.

When the quilting was done I made single-fold binding, and applied it as usual by first marking a straight line around the perimeter of the quilt, machine sewing the binding aligned with the marked line, machine-sewing the four corners, trimming the excess batting and backing, and then turning under a quarter-inch fold and hand-sewing it into place.

This is a good time for me to mention again that I'm teaching this binding technique in a Modern Quilt Guild Webinar on Thursday, September 29 at 9 pm Eastern time. If you're an MQG member, you can register for free. Go here to do that, if you haven't already. Gosh, I'm getting crazy-excited about this presentation! Like chill bumps-producing excited.

But the rest of the story about that Florida quilt...

It still wasn't quite on-the-square after adding binding, so I pinned it onto carpeting, measuring the length and width to make each side even, and measuring diagonally across the back to make sure those two numbers were the same. Then I sprayed water on the quilt back - the cotton batting layer is on the bottom (wool batting is on top) - and patted it into shape. After drying, it's more squared-up, but about 1/8" off. I'm not sure I can do much else short of soaking the quilt and reblocking it.

How about that backing? Isn't it too perfect?

A special hello and thanks to first-time visitors to my blog. I appreciate your visit too! Linda