Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2013 - Retro Flowers

If you're visiting from The Blogger's Quilt Festival, welcome to my little corner of quilt-blog land. I started quilting nearly two years ago, and have very quickly become completely obsessed with making quilts. I love participating in the Quilt Festival - it's such a great way to find new-to-me blogs.

Apologies to my regular readers for making you look at this one again, but my entry into the Home Machine Quilted Quilt category is my Retro Flowers quilt I finished earlier this month.

Quilt Stats:
Pattern - Retro Flowers by The Sometimes Crafter.
Fabric - Good Folks by Anna Maria Horner, with Kona PFD for the background.
Quilted - by me on my Bernina, using Aurifil 50wt in colour 2021.
Size - 60" square.

This quilt began back in April last year as part of the Retro Flowers QAL, so it's spent a lot of time languishing in a plastic tub while I worked on other projects, only being pulled out occasionally for a bit of piecing or trimming. But then a few weeks ago I pulled it out determined to finish it, and I'm so glad I did! I love it! It probably helps that Good Folks is the prettiest fabric line ever ;o) I learnt a huge amount while making it too, which is always a huge bonus.

It was my first foray into curved piecing and my first time trying some pretty epic custom quilting on a project - free-form feathers around the borders and triple stitched lines around all the flowers and feathers (inspired by the amazingly talented Lisa, one of my quilty heroes).

This quilt is entirely pieced and quilted with Aurifil 50wt in colour 2021 (my go-to thread). I really love the fabrics I used in the flowers, so I decided to go all-out on the quilting and try some new-to-me motifs. I started by stitching in the ditch around each petal, and then echo quilting about 1/4" away around the petals. I then quilting the feathers around the borders. It was then a process of stitching the triple stitch between each of the flowers, and around the feathers on the borders. It's hard to see in the photos, but each of those straight lines is actually three lines of stitching placed very close together. It gives the most wonderful corduroy-like texture. Most of the lines were done free hand, without marking - although I did mark some reference lines in some of the longer sections on the border.

I used a lot of thread on this quilt - it's a 60" square quilt and I think I went through about 12 bobbins (and nearly an entire 1000m spool of thread). The quilting took around 25 hours (althought it was worth every minute.) Despite the amount of quilting, it still has a wonderful drape.

When I stitched the feathers around the border I left a gap on two of the sides - I think these spots are probably my favorite of the whole quilt.

The back is also mostly Good Folks. The main piece (Small Gathering) is such a large scale print, it works really well as a quilt back. I actually like the back as much as the front, even if I didn't centre it very well ;o)

The quilting has shown up beautifully on the back. I have to say I'm a bit in love with the hand stitched binding too - I think I might be a convert.

Although it's only fairly small, this quilt now sits on the top of our bed, and makes me smile each and every time I walk into the bedroom :o)

I hope you enjoy the rest of the Festival - I'm looking forward to perusing all the entries this time around!

xx Jess