First Finish

This quilt has been finished for more than a week, but Florida weather hasn't been cooperative for getting outdoors to take a picture. We've had overcast skies (most contrary to Florida being the "Sunshine State"), rain, and cold temperatures - like Iowa in November. Not nice.

But at the Saturday Sew-In with Central Florida MQG friends, in spite of overcast skies, Cindy offered to hold my quilt for pictures. Thank you, Cindy! We picked a spot under a huge live oak tree dripping with Spanish moss. The gnarly texture of the tree trunks is beautiful.

To make this Rainbow Rounds quilt, over many months I foundation paper-pieced 16 12" X 12" quilt blocks. I prepped fabrics and papers, and in no hurry whatsoever, took them along to work on (using my tiny, aqua-colored Janome Derby) at weekly meetings of Big Cypress Quilters. In September, while on a week-long retreat with friends (#sixgalsretreat), I completed the quilt top.

In my last blog post I shared that I used homemade basting spray to sandwich five 24" X 24" quilts I made to hang in our living area. Rainbow Rounds is the first larger quilt (it finished at 57" X 57") that I also sandwiched using homemade basting spray. I used the same spray that remained from the first batch, and after giving the bottle a good shake, the spray worked just as it did well two weeks earlier. 

If I haven't expressed it sincerely enough, I will do so now... I love using homemade basting spray! It has changed my domestic machine quilting life - a surprise to me that after all these years of quiltmaking (since 1976) I have discovered something new to me.

Homemade basting spray is the bees knees!

I quilted an all over swirl on Rainbow Rounds. It's been a long time since I've quilted something other than custom quilting designs. The swirl was easy and fun to do. In case you'd like to try it, watch this video with Angela Walters. (Jennifer Keltner is in the video too, and ironically, she was my boss when I was an editor at American Patchwork and Quilting magazine back in 2001-2002. )

After quilting, I washed it. Even though I pulled the quilt from the dryer after ten minutes, and let it finish drying on a bed with a ceiling fan going overhead, it dried crumply - a look I'm not overly fond of. Perhaps it's unavoidable when batting is 100 percent cotton - Quilter's Dream Request. The thread used for quilting is YLI silver polished cotton.

I love the backing fabric because the print completely hides any hiccups in my quilting. The binding is pieced from different scraps of text prints used as backgrounds in the blocks.

Rainbow Rounds is a pattern by Jo Avery (MyBearPaw) that was in issue 24 of Love Patchwork and Quilting magazine. Jo originally called the quilt Bufferwheel, in case you'd like to look for it on Instagram. 

Rainbow Rounds, 57" X 57"

I'm tickled with my first 2018 finish. And even better, I have no end of pleasure in saying that I have NO quilt tops waiting to be quilted! What a delicious feeling!

Oh! And we're 15 days into January and I haven't bought any fabric! 😂 "No fabric purchases" is my 2018 goal and I'm stickin' to it! Linda