Here's my mama! Doesn't she look young? I bet you can't guess how old she is! To be fair, this picture was taken three years ago but I bet you still can't guess!
Someone gave her a bunch of scrap fabric and she hand cut them (no rotary) into squares and sewed them up into a little throw quilt.
Mom and I went shopping for some fabric to put on the back and asked for help in calculating how much fabric we would need to have enough backing. It's a real cute calico with yellow background and pink and blue flowers. It goes very nice with the pastel colors mom used on her quilt.
I've had the fabric and batting here for a while and decided this is the month I will finish. So I began preparing the backing to put on and was exasperated to find out that the piece of backing we bought is not big enough! Grrr. So I knew I would need to figure out something to enlarge the back and cut the backing into two pieces so I could sew some additional fabric down the middle. I don't know how in the world I managed it, but I sliced that back into four pieces! Oh great! Now what? I had a bunch of calico charm squares that I had purchased a long time ago so I decided to do this:
I actually kind of like this! So tonight, I got this all basted together and ready to quilt. For the quilting, I am going to attempt to do a version of a feathered swirl that I saw Vicki from Vicki's Crafts and Quilting do on one of her quilts.
First step was to practice on paper. Somehow, it just doesn't look like what I was envisioning. I finally contacted Vicki (thanks so much for the guidance, Vicki!) and was hoping she could give me some pointers so we exchanged a few e-mails back and forth and I showed her what I was trying to do. This was kind of the idea of the pattern I wanted to do but it wasn't right and I didn't know why. Vicki suggested I make the beginning of the swirl more C shaped instead of the bullseye looking shape I was doing.
So here is my next attempt with less tight swirls and the designs are starting to fit together a little better; however, Vicki had one more piece of advice for me and that was not to leave the feather ends hanging out in space as shown where the arrows are.
So I tried one more time with to make the feathers actually connect to something. I think I'm getting a little bit closer now to what I wanted to do. Still needs some work though. I'll practice a bit more. It's not quite there.
Now, next step is to quilt this on a practice sandwich and make sure to make the designs LARGE. I have a habit of quilting too densely and I want to practice leaving bigger spaces. So that is my goal for tomorrow.
I am hoping to have a finish to show you this week!
P.S. Don't forget about the Blog Hop sign up. You can read about that here! So far we have 19 quilters signed up! We'd love to have you join in the fun!
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