Thursday 2 August 2007

Nick and Anita's Quilt

Here is the latest quilt I finished. It was for Nick and Anita, who got married on July 14th. I couldn't post the pictures earlier, because a) the quilt wasn't quite finished; b) it had to be mailed in the US and c) I didn't want Anita and Nick to see it on the blog before they actually got it! Just heard that they have received the quilt in the mail so here it is! We went on vacation (and to a sewing machine collector's gathering) in Michigan the week after the wedding, so I took the quilt along, finished hand stitching the binding and attached the label. We then took it to a Post Office we found along the way and the friendly clerk (who was born in Canada!) helped us mail out the quilt in a 'foreign' country :-). Nick is an American and they moved to the US after the wedding. The quilt pattern is from Bonnie Hunter's wonderful website www.quiltville.com. It is made from 2 1/2" strips and called "Boxy Stars". If you look carefully at some of the corners of the star blocks, they look like three dimensional boxes.

I started auditioning fabrics to blend with the border fabric from the "Giverny" line. The white with little green flowers was perfect for the background and centers of the stars.


A closeup of the border fabrics:

The quilt is entirely pieced and quilted on my trusty 15-88 Singer treadle from 1951. I quilted leaves in the sashings. The green corner squares and navy blue sashings were of leftover fabrics from Ben and Heather's quilt.

A closeup of the quilting in the block. I also got brave and did the outline quilting around the star freehand. I was happy with the results. This will greatly help quilting on a large quilt....no more wrestling with a huge quilt turning it at every corner!


It's a little hard to see, but I quilted freehand feathers in the border of the quilt. I had never done feathers before and figured this would be a good border to practise on. I'm including two pictures of it. If you click on the picture you may be able to see it better.

The label:

3 comments:

comicbooklady said...

Oh what a beautiful quilt! You did a wonderful job machine quilting! It makes me happy to know one does not have to have the latest computer driven machine for machine quilting! The colours are gorgeous!

Jacqui's Quilts said...

Thanks for the compliments on the quilt. It is absolutely amazing to me what you can all do on these old Singer sewing machines! The machine I used for this quilt is a relatively 'new' treadle (1951) and has the capability of dropping the feed dogs. I just use a generic modern darning foot and after lots of practise :-), mastered the free motion. What I really like about the treadle is the fact that I can sew as slowly as I want and that the machine is level with the cabinet...no drag on the quilt like I had with my 1980's electric machine.

Jacqui in Canada

Anonymous said...

Beautiful - great job! I'm sure Nick and Anita will treasure it for years to come :0)