Sunday 11 January 2015

Granny's Garden

Whoohooo, on a roll here! Granny's Garden quilt now completed and delivered safely to it's new home!  This uses the Lauren and Jessi Jung Trellis Quilt pattern (linky) and Riley Blake Designs Calliope range.  The backing and binding was a selection of sale fabrics from Abakhan.




I have to say (and I've probably said before) that isn't really my type of thing, the fabric is a bit too pastel flowery for me. But my Nan definitely loved it so its all good. Regardless of the fabric I am immensely proud of how this turned out.  I had a nightmare when I started to pin it together because the tension between the trellis centre and the border fabrics was completely out and all the borders were crinkled up.  I had to unpick all the borders and sew it back on making sure there was a lot more tension in the border fabric than the trellis.  I think it's because all the trellis fabric is all cut on the bias so it does 'weird' things - I had the same issue with the Wintersmith quilt (I really should finish that up!).

Once I'd sorted the tension and pinned everything together, it was surprisingly quick to quilt all the meandering squiggles over the trellis. I did think about doing lines, but I really wanted to practise free motion quilting and I love the texture it gives to the finished quilt.  It turned out quite well - definitely each quilt is a little bit better than the last.  Increasing the machine tension to 5.4 helped, along with taking it slowly, especially on the loops.


For the borders I quilted straight lines about half an inch apart setting the stitch length to 3mm.

The binding was hand sewn down then I machined over it.  For other quilts I've used some of the decorative stitches on the machine, but this time I just went with a simple zig zag - setting the stitch width 2.0mm and length to 2.5mm.


I even managed to be a bit more patient with the label making!! Waiting for the transfer to cool before peeling off the paper makes so much difference!



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