Fall Quilt Festival

I look forward to the time each spring and fall that Amy of Amy's Creative Side hosts the Quilt Festival. I created a new "pride and joy" this year so that is what I am showing.

The story behind the quilt . . .

My daughter-in-law (newly engaged at the time) told me that she wanted me to make her a double wedding ring quilt. She wanted to challenge me, I guess. Well, I knew the exact quilt I wanted to make. Janet at Quiltsalot was making the perfect double wedding ring quilt. So I emailed her and asked if there was a pattern. She explained that she drew it off herself from a different quilt she had seen. So I then asked her if she minded if I used the applique on her quilt to look off of to draw a pattern. She said she didn't mind, so the work began.

First I drew off a pattern. Then I began sewing the blocks. Even though I had purchased the templates and had a pattern to follow, I still made mistakes putting the blocks together and had to rip out several times.

 I began the quilt on January and had all of the blocks pieced and on the design wall before May 1.

I did embroidery the names and dates on before I sewed all of the blocks together. 

After all of the blocks were machine pieced and sewn together, I began working on the applique. First, I traced one side of applique onto the background fabric. I then kind of blocked the sides off in halves and focused on 1/8 of the border at a time.

The picture below was posted here on September 19. 

After I machine appliqued all the flowers and stems on, I decided that since some flowers had several layers, I would cut away the backing fabric from behind the applique.

Then I laid the applique border on the floor and pinned the quilt top to the applique. I ended up pressing the edge of the quilt under 1/4 inch and straight stitching it onto the applique border. Next came the batting and backing. I decided to use a sheet so that I did not have to worry about piecing the back.

Then the quilting began. I knew exactly how I wanted to quilt the double wedding ring quilt blocks so that didn't take very long.

I guess you could say that the quilting on the applique border evolved as I went along. I began by quilting around the applique. Then I decided I needed a dense filler to help take in the extra fabric where the border stretched a little as I appliqued and quilted. (Not sure I want to show this next picture.)

You can definitely see how puffy the border is after I outlined the applique. So the small stippling just kind of developed out of necessity to ease in the fabric.

It was a long process and took me the better part of a year. I began in January, 2011 and finished putting the labels on the quilt on September 30. The wedding was October 1. You can see the happy couple with it in my header.

What I learned . . .

I learned a lot while I made this quilt and I will make another one, maybe two. The next time, I will have the border divided into fourths and will only work with 1/4 of the border at one time. This time, I had the whole border sewn together and had to lug it around as I appliqued. I think the pulling and tugging caused the fabric to stretch some.

For the applique, I used only a few pattern pieces and they were overlapped quite a bit. I may add a few more pieces so that they do not over lap as much. I would still cut away the backing fabric from behind the applique to take away some of the thickness.

Happy snipping, stitching, and quilting!