Maple Leaf Quilt {Finished}

Thanks so much for all your lovely wishes after yesterday's post. My little girl is heaps better today and we managed to get a decent amount of sleep last night, so I'm feeling almost human again today. I also managed to get the Maple Leaf/wedding quilt finished last night, and I couldn't be happier with it. The weather has conspired against me (it is POURING today), but it didn't stop me taking a huge number of indoor photos ;o)

As I mentioned previously, the fabrics I've used in this quilt were chosen quite deliberately. My brother and his finace said they love red and blue, so I pulled a bunch of reds, orange-reds, navy, aqua and green-blues and tried to include lots of fabric that will mean something to them (bikes, tea cups, forest-type images, houses etc). As Charlotte said, it's a bit like an adult i-spy quilt :o)

I wanted to give this quilt some subtle movement with the quilting, so I chose to follow the diagonal created by the leaves and straight line quilt the background (which stabilised the leaves at the same time). The quilting is all free motion quilting - I could probably have used my walking foot for this, but I MUCH prefer doing this type of quilting using my FMQ foot. I find it less boring, and because these were relatively short lines it wasn't too difficult to keep them straight(ish). Any longer, and it involves a bit more quilt wrangling and I get more wonky patches when I need to pause mid line. I find the texture is a bit different too when quilting straight lines using FMQ compared to a walking foot - partly because they aren't truly straight, and possibly because the walking foot flattens it more? I'm not sure.

I didn't mark any lines, but by starting along the edge of the HSTs, I was able to keep them relatively straight. I think the slightly organic straight lines really suit this quilt anyway (although maybe that's just my inner perfectionist making excuses for the slight wonkiness?) A small warning - pulling a quilt diagonally through the machine is a lot more work than straight up and down (which is what I usually do when I FMQ straight lines) and my shoulders are paying for it. I could have rolled my quilt up along the diagonal to do it, but I would have struggled to fit it under my machine, especially for the centre blocks.

Once I'd quilted out the background, I had a bit of fun quilting the leaves. Some of them are quilted using the fabric as a guide, or as inspiration.

A few have swirly, air-current kind of quilting.

I used Aurifil 50wt for all my quilting, apart from the very dark navy leaves. I had a small spool of 28wt Aurifil from a sample pack I won ages ago, and the colour matched perfectly so I had my first experience quilting with a much thicker thread. It was exactly like quilting with 50wt, but the stitches show up much more - I'd love to use it again.

I had a bit of fun with this block - I was thinking topographical map lines when I quilted this one, and I really love how it turned out. Another idea to keep in mind for future quilts!

And I can't seem to quilt anything without at least a few pebbles.

I think my favorite blocks are those with straight lines though (and almost wish I had just done all the leaves like it.)

The back is a really cool HST design fabric I picked up from Spotlight - it felt like the perfect accompaniment to all the HSTs on the front.

Quilt Stats:

* Block - the traditional Maple Leaf block, made at 15"
* Size - 75" square
* Fabric - the background is Kona Ivory, along with various fabrics, including Lush Uptown, Botanics, Architextures, Denyse Schmidt, Tsuru
* Quilted - on my Bernina 440QE

I'm linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts, Free Motion Friday and Gemma's iQuilt linky party!

I hope everyone has a great weekend (and that this rain stops before the wedding tomorrow!)

xx Jess