The Wedding Quilt

Our trip to Phoenix was planned around my sister-in-law's wedding.

The quilt in the pictures from Albuquerque was my gift to them. I really loved making this quilt and it was quite fun having it oohed and aaahed over at the wedding luncheon. My gift was the only one opened at the reception. I'm afraid I insisted. After putting that much time into it - I want to be able to see the recipient's face when they open it. Terribly selfish of me, isn't it?

I know Nikki appreciated it because she makes lovely quilts herself. Besides... a picture's worth a thousand words.

And here it is...

I might add more to the inscription. It depends if I can think of anything profound to say.


The quilting is quite simple- just along the block seamlines.


I will get better images when I'm in Albuquerque visiting my parents. My house is too small to get a really good image of the quilt. I can't get far enough away from it to get a good perspective.

And going outside isn't really an option- the weather is not being cooperative.
This is the beginning of 4-8 inches of new snow...


Phoenix, here we come!

Quilt

Quilting...

Taking out all of the basting pins...


Close up of the fabric and quilting... because I wanted to see if my camera could and it did!

Trimming the extra batting and backing off...

The binding is sewn on...


Now all I have to do is hand-sew the binding on to the back. AND I AM DONE! And, I can quite happily say that I still have 5 days until we leave (big grin!)

Top's done!

The top is done and sandwiched with the batting and the backing!

It is ready for me to go and start quilting - right after supper :) One must not forget to eat -even in the middle of a project.

Gwen asked what percent of time I would spend quilting after piecing and everything. I'm guessing it is between 5 and 10 percent. I'm really hoping closer to 5 because I have already spent over 200 hours on the quilt. I know it could take a lot longer. I am not doing anything fancy and I am doing it by machine.

I will spend a lot of time wrestling with a queen sized quilt and my regular sized sewing machine. I know it's doable because I've quilted two other queen quilts on it, but not my favorite part.

Hope to have it ready to bind by the end of the weekend.

Again there are no pictures. William is traveling to Washington DC and took the camera with him. I will post pictures of it finished before I leave for Arizona (one week from tomorrow). Warmth here we come!

10 and counting

No pictures- but I'm down to 10 pieces!

The top should be done by tomorrow and I can move on to quilting!

Isn't it strange that it is called quilting when probably 80% of the time is getting to that stage?

I think most appropriately this quilt should be called pinning. The seams resemble a porcupine when they are ready to sew!

Progress

Well, I am down to 500 pieces!

All of the corners are sewn on the blocks and they are trimmed



and up on my wall. I know I wouldn't have gotten this far without my helper:




I can feel the end coming!

I have a question, when you have a big project like this, is there a point about 2/3 through it, that you just about hate it? I am at that point with this and know I need to work past it, but boy is it hard. It's good I have such a tight deadline with this. I have about half a minute I can spend on this feeling before I have to move on.

This will give you an idea of what it will look like. I am not going to worry too much about keeping these squares in this exact order. I think I'll combine these squares into larger squares before I do that. 500 pieces are a lot to keep track of.

Quilting Progress

Well, I've gone from this


to this

since the beginning of the year...

Right now I'm trimming all of the squares(or octagons rather)and then comes the fun part.

I get to put them up on the wall and decide which goes where!

Then have to put corners on all of them and sew them together...then quilt and bind it!

Deep breath. This is a big project with a tight deadline. The best way to get through it is one step at a time.

Wish me luck

Some stats:
Quilt for my sister-in-law's wedding in March
5760 pieces (already down to 2400- hooray!)
You can get the idea of what this will like at the top of my blog- I used the same pattern to make the quilt that is used as the background to the title.
This is a scrap quilt- it has lots of treasures: scraps from clothing my mother made my brother & I when we were little, a piece of fabric that was my grandmother's. Fabrics from friends in California, fabrics from almost every quilt I have made and lots of the clothes I've made for Coleen too.
The original quilt had larger squares - I believe they were 6", but for this quilt I shrunk them to 4" because I wanted to use the above scraps and a lot of them were not big enough to get pieces out of for a 6" block.
That means there will be 480 blocks in this quilt.

I hope to have it up on the wall by this weekend.