craftlog

I’ve been working on this quilt for somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 years. I got my mom to pick out the kit for me from the Keepsake Quilting catalog. It doesn’t look like they sell the kit any more. I pieced the blocks by hand, back when I didn’t have a sewing machine. They weren’t square At All, so I figured it was hopeless. I let it sit for a few years and tried piecing the blocks by machine once I got one. The first one I tried still wasn’t square, so I decided to just sew them all together (by machine) and see what happened. I was amazed. It looks like an honest-to-god quilt. Some of the corners didn’t come out exactly, but still. The quilting I did by hand, too. Quilting pretty much sucks. You can’t see the quilting in the picture, unfortunately, but there are little quilted tulips in the white squares. They took a loooong time and made my fingers hurt. They look pretty, though. I didn’t bother to quilt the border, as recommended by the directions. Next quilt I do is going to be machine quilted. Binding the thing was a bit of a disaster. The directions said I was going to have to hand-sew the back edge down, and there was pretty much no way I was going to do that. I came up with a seemingly brilliant trick to bind it all by machine, and it worked, but I now understand why they want you to do it the other way. I’m going to make another post describing the trick, because I couldn’t find anything similar on the web. Anyway, then I washed it in the bathtub and let it dry on low in the drier with some (already dry) towels. It wrinkled up all nice and quilty where I quilted the little tulips. I wish I could blame it’s trapezoidal shape completely on holding the camera crooked, but it’s about an inch longer on one side than the other. I’m sending it to my mom for her 50th birthday.