The Real Finish

This is the real finish for this quilt I'm calling 'Woven Words'. The blocks were made by the board members of our state reading association. I am the president this year and the blocks were the idea of my friend Jo. She knows that I love to quilt and thought this would make a great memory quilt.

I took some much loved Laurel Burch fabric to frame the blocks. I wanted to use a striped fabric with butterflies, dragonflies, and hummingbirds for the vertical pieces. To get the most out of my limited supply, I decided to make the framing stripes look like a weaving. Can you see it? 

This is the back. I used some of the leftover stripes.

The quilting is mostly vertical stitch in the ditch with diagonal quilting across the word blocks. The quilting is more visible from the back.

Do you think this can double as the label? Finished Saturday, September 13, 2014.

Very pleased with how it looks.

Kinda Finished Friday

If I didn't have to go to work I would have finished this quilt. Tomorrow I could finish the cross-hatch quilting, cut the binding and sew it on but we are going to Memphis for the day. So here is the kinda finish for this Friday....

This was at the half-way point.

Here is the finished top.

Can you see the over/under woven effect?

It was fun figuring out how to sew it in pieces.

Close ups of the personalized blocks.

More blocks...

Top corner...

Other side...

Soon I will share the real finish. 

I love all these hand-drawn blocks. 

The butterflies, dragonflies, hummingbirds, and cats are my favorites from a couple of Laurel Burch lines. So glad I get to keep this one.

Best part - all of it worked. I planned, sketched, figured, cut and sewed. AND IT WORKED!

My Quilty Secrets

I read a post from another quilter who listed her 10 quilty secrets. I don't know if I have ten or more but here are some that have been perking around in my brain since reading her blog.
1. I love trimming the excess fabric and batting after machine quilting the layers together. It is so rewarding to see the almost finished quilt revealed.
2. I hate unpinning all the pins used to baste the layers together. Ugh. My fingers hurt from pinching open and closing all those pins.
3. I will never quilt a large quilt. I will send it to a long arm quilter.
4. I like the look of all the free motion quilting but I will probably never do it myself.
5. I hate to appliqué. I avoid patterns that have appliqué.

6. I like my quilts loosely quilted, not densely quilted. I go for snuggly not cardboard stiff.
7. I like piecing tops and designing pieced tops. I even like making pieced backs. But quilting, not so much.
8. I like bright colors-like you couldn't figure that out from looking at my quilts! ;-)
9. I think calling soft colors or muted tones 'low volume' is weird. Seems like the wrong term to use.
10. Sometimes an idea for a quilt gets in my brain and I have to draw it in my chart paper journal.
11. I don't get people who just keep making the same pattern over and over, sometimes in different colors but still the same pattern. I have made lots of giant nine patch baby blankets but just because they are quick and I am giving them away.
12. My favorite kind of quilt is a sampler. If I was the judge at a quilt show, that's what I would pick-and no appliqué!