Amish Spring Roses - All Finished!

Short on verbage, long on pictures!

Homemade Forts Are Great Fun

Last night I finished the last stretch of quilting on the border pieces of my Amish roses --- all 20 feet of feather and cable twist quilting done! Which left many many more feet of hand stitching the backing pieces together. Ick.

But with the end in sight I have been diligently stitching away, and I have gradually come to nickname the quilt "Frankenstein" -- partially because that is what my stitches remind me of, and partially because this quilt is for a friend named Shelley (the story of Frankenstein of course was written by Mary Shelley). My stitches have improved since I draped the quilt up on my quilting frame. But they got a little wobbly when my inspectors showed up and set me to giggling ...

Yep, that is my daughter using my draped quilt as a fort. While wearing a folded FQ on her head as a hat. Playing with some "My Little Ponies" and my other Quilt Inspector.

It didn't help my progress at all but it sure was funny!

Adventures with Quilt-as-you-go.

I have been diligently sewing away at home, in between enjoying some gorgeous weather and of course all the blog posts from the Spring Quilt Market. I would love to go there one year --- I bet it is great fun when quilters take over a city!

My Amish Spring Roses quilt is zipping right along. Here is a picture of one of the side panels --- and about 15 inches of progress on the cable/feather twist motif. Oh boy, only 81 inches left --- on THIS one :D And then of course the other side and also the bottom will need matching feather twisties. Good thing I am having fun doing them!

I do also have the entire center panel done, and the pillow panel with its applique. I definitely need to use larger backing blocks next time I do gigantic applique blocks, because I underestimated the amount they would gather in and it was tricky to stitch the blocks together. I'm a little disappointed with the looseness of the backing between blocks, but maybe if I don't mention it people will think I planned it that way ... as part of the charm of a comfy country quilt ..

And maybe I will have to hand stitch a tuck along the top seams so that the blocks lay flatter and please my sense of quilt propriety.

I love Fusing

I proudly present reverse engineering at it's finest!

This is my version of "Amish Spring Roses", which I 'made' from a picture I posted about earlier. I sketched my own templates (7 shapes in all), made a layout on a huge piece of freezer paper so the rose blocks wouldn't be wonky, and searched high and low for proper red fabrics to use.

Dark - Quilter's Choice Marbles
Medium - Quilter's Choice Marbles
Light - Hoffman Silent Inspirations

and 9 blocks of plain white at 18 1/2 inches square.

Of course in the swatches online and in this picture it is difficult to truly appreciate the colour -- especially the glorious reds!

Armed with a roll of fusible webbing, a pencil, an iron, and my templates I started snipping and sticking my blocks together. Each rose is layered with the sepals (green leaves below the first petals), small petals, and large petals overlapping slightly. Today I will work on appliqueing each block with colour matching threads.

The 9 blocks shown in the picture are sized to lay exactly across the center portion of a double bed. with panels to the sides and also at top and bottom. The only other panel that will contain applique will be the 'pillow' panel, and the other three will consist of traditional Amish quilt motifs (done by machine however!) I can't wait to get started on the quilting :)