This quilt has a fun story behind it. If you've ever seen the opening credits of the movie Stitched, then you've seen a quilting bee furiously sewing in time-lapse motion. If you look in the back of the room, I'm in my dark green Baylor sweatshirt (they filmed in February at our LQS), and in the front is my bee friend, Jennifer, sewing one of my birthday blocks! It eventually went into this quilt:
Blue Bullseye
This is another Fons and Porter book quilt pattern (Quilts from America's Heartland). The blocks started as part of a bee birthday block exchange. I gave bee friends the foundation squares and they added strips from their stash to create blocks for my birthday in March...about four years ago!!! So the blocks are basically half of a string block.
Since I am relatively new to quilting, I like to try new things. Because of the beautiful blues that reminded me of the sea (and the nautical prints), I decided that I would FMQ with silver metallic thread. Yeah, you heard me FMQ WITH METALLIC THREAD! Sometimes you don't know what you don't know until you know, you know? So, FMQ with metallic thread is not fun or easy, especially with a heavily pieced back. I KNOW; I AM CRAZY!
Back of Blue Bullseye Quilt
Look, I had a LOT of blue scraps (partly because I bought a Robert Kaufman solids FQ tower of blues!), and I wanted to use them up. I still have lots of blue fabric; it is my favorite color, so maybe that's okay.
So, the quilting...
The half of the block that wasn't strips was quilted to LOOK like strips, so straight line quilting. I also used variegated thread in blues. It shows up really well on the back.
For the FMQ, I turned to Leah Day's blog for inspiration (The Free Motion Quilting Project). Great video tutorials and easy to find the type of design you need. I used a lot of the center fill designs in this quilt.
This is a finish (finally!), and I have even added a label! (Afterhought of course, but at least I got it on there.)
This quilt has a scrappy binding, by the way. Again, trying to use up blue scraps. I made it 3.5" wide, just to account for all the piece-i-ness of the binding. I did traditional machine-sew-to-the-front-hand-sew-to-the-back since the scrappy binding was so busy.
The piecing is not perfect, and the quilting is far from perfect. I will probably not put it in the WHQG Quilt Show in March, because of the quilting. But I did learn a LOT from making this quilt, and it really is pretty!
The piecing is not perfect, and the quilting is far from perfect. I will probably not put it in the WHQG Quilt Show in March, because of the quilting. But I did learn a LOT from making this quilt, and it really is pretty!
I have to say that I was so-so about this quilt until I saw the picture of it hanging on the clothes line. The bullseye really makes it pop! I'd like to think that Grandma Pink would love this quilt too; I feel it has some of her color aesthetic in it.
Grandma Pink's quilt
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