And so the quilt top was done... in 2016....
I love this design and really wanted to quilt this piece properly, but with my 25 year-old machine whose feed dogs would not lower, I just couldn't do it justice. So I took this home to my mother's sewing room in New Brunswick with an ambitious vision of freemotion quilting the entire thing, while framing out the sharded squares with a more geometric pattern.
As you will see from the pictures above (especially on the navy backing), this is what I eventually achieved, but it took FOREVER to get any traction on the quilt, since every time I went home and tried to work on it, we had mechanical problems or the thread tension was off or the free motion foot wasn't working....
Until this 2017 holiday season! I received a new and wonderful sewing machine for the holidays, and thought its maiden voyage should include vanquishing this beast of a project. To my utter delight, the new machine took to the free motion quilting like butter, and I had all of the outer freemotion border pieces done before leaving to come back to Ottawa! With that, all I had left was to frame in the sharded squares, trim things up and sew on the binding. I machine sewed the binding to the front of the quilt, and then turned it and hand-sewed it with a slipstitch on the back. It took time to finish but I am really pleased with the final look.
After a year and a half of languishing over this project, it felt like an epic start to the year to finally get this quilt finished. As it was my white whale for so long, I will be keeping this one, using it in my guest bedroom--- and I hope it had many years of delight and warmth to share!
Here's to an inspiring 2018 full of new projects, new machines, new experiments and all things quiltingly awesome!