Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2012 / Just Wing It

Amy from Amy's Creative Side is hosting the Blogger's Quilt Festival again. This is my first time participating in the festival as an "exhibitor", so thanks for stopping by! Today I would like to share with you a quilt that really started it all for me. For my regular readers, this will probably be just a tad familiar since this quilt took me a little less than a year to finish, during which time I documented and shared my entire process. 

Just Wing It (Embroidery 101) Quilt -front-

Just Wing It (Embroidery 101) Quilt -back-

I started this large throw-size quilt last summer as part of Jennie and Clara's Embroidery 101 Stitch and Quilt Along over at Clover and Violet. The focus of the QAL was to learn how to embroider while making a quilt using simple blocks, each meant to frame a hand stitched design. I approached this QAL sort of backwards though. While I had already finished lots of needlework projects prior to this, I was completely new to quilting and wanted to find a way to get my feet wet while also bringing my embroidery skills into the project. 

 

I ended up designing and hand stitching each of the 12 unique embroidered blocks in my quilt, while also really taking the time to learn how to cut and piece accurately during the process of making the top. It then took me a little longer after finishing the top to get comfortable with quilting such a large project (60" x 80") on my small domestic sewing machine, but in the end, I'm glad I just went ahead and jumped in. 

Finished Quilt Top

I ended up using simple straight line quilting to echo the shape of the concentric boxes created by the individual blocks on the front. In order to work with the bulk of the quilt on my smaller machine, I quilted all of the vertical lines first and then the horizontal ones, breaking the thread at each of the corners of the boxes.

 

For the backing, I chose to do a stripe of scrappy strips at the top using some left over prints. I paired that with some larger strips of some smaller print fabrics from the same collection. The larger aqua colored piece, which reads as a solid in the photos, is actually a subtle mini-stripe print, also from Just Wing It.

For the binding, I used another mini-stripe print, this time in tomato red. I like the way the red adds a subtle pop of color to the outer frame of the quilt, especially against the white sashing.

I am also linking up today with Katie for the Handmade Parade: