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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Ever decreasing octagons

I can't wait until this quilt is finished - it's going to be the cosiest thing ever and the colours are just fab-u-lous. Thank you again Felix for picking out such a wonderful bunch of fabrics.

Cabbage patch quilt

I dug the quilt out at the weekend to put in some long overdue work on it. I'd been a bit worried the last time I worked on it that, due to the backing fabric being somewhat shorter than it should really have been, there was going to be some really unsightly puckering. Looking at it now I'm not really sure why I was so worried. The puckering is nowhere near as severe as I'd remembered and it actually makes the quilt look more vintage-y.

Cabbage patch quilt

The quilting for this design is rather labour intensive. I'm stitching concentric octagons inside each block using the width of the machine foot with the needle set in the left-most position as a guide. It's taking a long time but I've now quilted 16 out of 24 blocks so I'm two thirds of the way there.

As always I've learnt a few lessons along the way. I wish I'd used a pink top thread to quilt the pink blocks. I don't know why but I can never remember that I can use different colours for the top thread and the bobbin thread. I also wish I'd decided to hand quilt this. It would have taken longer but there would have been less frustration over snapped threads and jammed bobbins, plus the effort of rotating a single bed sized quilt through the arch of a regular sewing machine, and I would have been able to sit on the sofa under the quilt whilst I did it.

Cabbage patch quilt

I still need to make a decision on whether or not to quilt the border and what to do for the binding. Abby suggested a wide satin ribbon which would be pretty but might be difficult to stitch in place. I'm really looking forward to handstitching the binding in place. It's just the job for a wintry afternoon with an old movie and a mug of hot chocolate.

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