Bloggers Quilt Festival - Autumn 2012

This season's quilt for Bloggers Quilt Festival  (item 443), is from when I was asked to do a talk / demo at Threave Quilters.  Within the group I'm known for being a quilter who has a more improv approach rather than traditional pieced quilts.

It's something that I've unconsciously embraced in recent years, and enjoyed.  I seem to have fondness for making up blocks and tweaking them around to form quilts as I go along.

So bearing this in mind I decided to take the simple wavy 'hourglass' block that I used for the Fat Quarterly Aurifil Challenge and extend it into blocks for a quilt.  In my stash I had 5 lovely Zen fabrics, purchased a few years ago, and I worked out how to maximise the fabric usage in creating a block.  To accompany the Zen fabrics I hand dyed 5 additional FQ's and additional fabric for background sashing and the quilt back.

Here's a guide as to how I cut out the FQ's, and pieced them together.

Then I worked out the format/placement of the blocks.

Once the blocks were made, and they pieced together quite quickly, I sorted out a random placement to ensure that positive and negative blocks using the same fabrics weren't placed beside each other.

Unfortunately there was a bit of stress with the quilting.  I had certain ideas for quilting that I'd like to have used, but as I was quilting on a domestic machine and the throat bed wasn't deep enough the lovely looping pattern I'd planned wouldn't work (I couldn't get a lovely smooth loop as I'd have to stop and start along the length of the loop).  So after some trial and error, and quite a bit of unpicking I came up with this for each block.

And this is how the finished quilt looks........

So to summarise -

• finished quilt measures:  approx 60x78"
• techniques used:  improv, pieced, hand dyed fabrics combined with commercial
• quilted by:  by self on domestic sewing machine
• best categories:   bed quilt, home machine quilt  

It's now carefully set aside as a present for someone next year....