Needlework Tuesday - As Good As Finished

 I can finally breath a sigh of relief, this quilt is as good as finished needing only the binding.   I'll have to check my stash and see if I have a brown fabric that will work.

It measures about 61 inches on a side.

This quilt was fun to make.  I used a variety of templates from Marti Michell and made up the design from the middle out.

This quilt will find a home in our camper when that season arrives.

 One of my goals for this project was to practise my machine quilting.  I have such grand ideas in my head, but at present my skill level isn't there.  This quilt, with all the busy fabrics, gave me the opportunity  to play with a variety of designs.  I started with the tutorial  The Dizzy Daisy by Lori Kennedy at The Inbox Jaunt blog.   It is a combination of flowers and swirls/baptist fan motifs.

 The narrowest border, 1 inch, received a repeated swirl, inspired by the centre of the swirl/fans from the centre.  Show in the red/orange border at the right of the photo.  The next 2 inch border uses a motif that reminds me of corrugated cardboard.  It is easy to do and can be adapted to any width space.   Shown in the light green border on the left of the photo.

The middle row used just the swirl/fan of the Dizzy Daisy motif.

The tumbler border is 6 inches wide and this time I used the flowers from the centre.  There is a tutorial called Happy Blossoms. it was a bit tricky to get into the spaces, but with a few extra leaves added here and there, I was able to give a fairly consistent coverage. 

The final outer border gave me a bit of a challenge.  It was four inches wide, which would have been difficult to work with on my machine.  I first stitched a line, one inch from the previous border and added a row of swirls in that area.  Then I did the same corrugated cardboard motif, alternating it every three inches from horizontal to vertical.  Ignore the white chalk marks that I've yet to remove.

I did practise each motif on a separate piece of layered fabric before starting on the quilt.  Even with that, I did improve as the work progressed.  The hardest part of machine quilting is keeping the motifs at the same scale throughout the project.  Having a reference sample to refer to really helped.

Now that I have this completed, I am looking forward to my next quilt.

Needlework Tuesday is a regular weekly post where I share the progress of my various needlework projects over the past week. I enjoy the encouragement that I receive from my readers and in return visit their blogs and cheer them on with theirs. You are welcome to grab the cute little mouse and create your own Needlework Tuesday post. Leave a comment with a link and I'll be sure to visit with you.

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