Mike & Gabby: Here's My Heart....

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Here's My Heart....

Yeah! I'm finally done. I've never spent as long quilting a quilt as I have on this one and it's only 31" square! However, I'm loving it and think it was worth all the hours I put into it. (If it looks a little wonky in the picture, it's just because of my picture taking abilities!)

I tried so many new techniques on this quilt, including Diane-shiko, curved cross-hatching, echo quilting, micro stippling and a back and forth meander in the outer border (not sure what it's called). You can see most of them here in this picture of the back of the quilt.

Here's a full picture of the back. That's a hanging sleeve at the top. I usually split my sleeve in the middle, so I can slide a wooden rod through and hang my quilts with a single nail from the center. I usually make the pocket a bit bigger, but that was all the fabric I had left and it was just enough to finish it.

I quilted birds in each of the outer 4 corners of the quilt, echo quilted around them and then finally micro stippled the rest of the space. I used Golden Threads quilting paper to mark the birds and then stitch them onto the quilt.

I wish I had kept track of how many hours it took me to quilt this. I can only guesstimate at this point, but I'm figuring somewhere around 70 hours. That's a lot of time, but I was learning a bunch of new techniques and I did get faster with practice and repetition. Besides, this will be an heirloom, so I suppose the time spent doesn't really matter!

So, the stats for this quilt are:

Size: 31" square
Fabrics: A kit from Plain and Simple Quilt Shop, Backing is a Moda Marble
Batting: 2 layers - Warm & White, Tuscany Wool Batting
Thread - Aurifil to piece, YLI 100# Silk Thread for hand applique and all quilting
Pattern - Here's My Heart by Bunny Hill Designs
Quilting - Custom, A couple of the bird patterns came from Hari Walner's Continuous-Line Quilting Designs
Completed - April 1, 2013
Started - January 2011

I had to look back through old posts to see when I started this quilt and see it was over 2 years ago. At that point, I had already had the kit for a couple of years as well. Then it sat languishing, waiting for me to get around to quilting it. I always new I wanted to do something special on it; I was just hesitant to get started it. I'm so glad to finally have gotten over myself and just do it! Now on to the next one...

Throughout the quilting process, I got lots of help. So much so, that I kept a lint brush and tweezers beside my sewing machine so I could make sure I didn't sew any cat hair into this quilt. I think I spent so much time on it, each of them came to visit me to get some attention. Here, it's obviously Jack's turn...