Jun 13 15
Finishing the Piecing of a Large Top and Blog Woes
This is where I left off on my journey of making this quilt. My design walls have stuff on them so the only way I could work on it was to spread pieces out on the floor, so I apologize in advance for all the wonky photos.
My next step was to add a machine embroidery applique border around the whole thing. If the feathers on the sides look different than the feathers on the top/bottom, it’s because the thread color of the candlewicking stitches in the inner plume designs was a different color. (This is a good lesson in the power of thread as a design element.) This was not intentional but instead the by-product of doing multiple things at once and not paying close enough attention to what was going on! Once I’d finished making the 2nd border and realized my error, I wasn’t going to use that border but I really wanted to finish piecing this quilt to I could start the quilting process, so I decided to “settle.” Hope I don’t regret this error!
I then added a narrow border of turquoise around the whole quilt. Sometimes I do this because I believe a narrow section of a specific color will help all the colors “pop” in the final product and sometimes I do it because I want to quilt a specific design inside that border and sometimes I do it for both reasons. I don’t design my quilts on paper/computer ahead of time, I just wing it and design a quilt as I am going through the process of making it. If you knew me in my “other life,” (aka non-quilting life), this would be shocking because I am an incredibly deliberate person who plans out everything but I simply can’t work that way as a quilter! Anyway, here’s a shot w/the turquoise border:
I need to point out 2 things. First, this quilt now appears very rectangular because of how the photos are taken but it is actually square. The other thing is that the color of the turquoise border is very “off” from what it is in real life. I guess you’ll have to trust me that it really does add a nice “pop!” My final border was another machine embroidery applique border. It really did come out looking nice but the colors in my photos are just not right:
I wish I could have gotten better photos but I’m very happy with how this one turned out and can’t wait to start quilting it. Quilt tops like this that have a lot of machine embroidery applique are extremely heavy (I’m referring to just the quilt top, not the whole quilt.) I have found that once I get to a size that’s greater than about 50 in x 50 in, I can’t really count on spray basting to hold these heavy tops in place, so when they get larger than that, I pay a long arm quilter to baste it for me and then I do the quilting. I’m hoping to get this baby back in the next couple weeks so I can start the quilting… I miss her already!
In other news, some of you have written to me about all the photos missing from my blog. The company that hosts our web site and blog had server issues a couple of weeks ago and the website and blog were down for a few days. Once they got things back up and transferred to a new set of servers, the web site was an older version of itself for awhile. They’ve had to kind of “re-build” many web sites very quickly and ever since this happened, most of the photos on my blog that were posted in the last year have disappeared. I don’t know if this can be fixed or not but we’re trying! I really apologize for it because a quilting blog is pretty worthless without photos and it took me hundred of hours to get all this stuff up there the first time. I’ve started going back (in no particular order) and re-uploading/inserting photos from some of the older posts, so over the last year, it will be hit or miss for awhile as to whether those posts have photos in them or not. Most of the much older posts still have photos, so it’s still worth your time to go back in the archives if you’re going back at least a year. In the meantime, a little bit of hot, sizzling summer color for you:
Lovely quilt. I also have a friend long arm baste my practice quilt. Other wise I give her all my quilts to do. I find any pictures I put on the internet like FB distorts the color and its frustrating. I enjoy your blog. Have a great day.
Ohh! I just love looking at your quilts and quilting, they are beautiful!