Raven's Camera Quilt - A Blogger's Quilt Festival Entry

It's the Blogger's Quilt Festival week! Each quilter can enter two quilts in the festival and it's so fun browsing through all the entries. There are so many talented quilters. I wanted to be a part of all the excitement.

My favorite finish so far this year is Raven's Camera Quilt. Raven is a professional photographer and my niece. Her mom commissioned this quilt to give her for her birthday.

You can see more pictures and read all about the creation of this quilt here.

Please visit the Blogger's Quilt Festival and be inspired by all the wonderful entries. Amy does a fantastic job every year hosting this event.

Finished Camera Quilt

Six months in the making, this quilt is finished and on its way to its new home.

Late last year, my sister-in-law asked if I would make a quilt for her daughter, my niece, for her birthday. I had been wanting to make a quilt for my niece for a long time and I knew I could get it finished in a six-month window. The only criteria given to me was that her favorite color is teal. I wrote about the start of this quilt here.

My niece is a professional photographer so it was easy to decide on the camera block. And what a great stash buster, too. As I always do, I started with a very narrow palette of teal and quickly realized that I needed to expand. This was both to add more interest to the quilt and also because there was only so much teal in my stash.

Each block finishes at 10" x 7.5". Without borders the top measures 60"x75". The circles that make the lens of each block are fused on with two-sided fusible interfacing and then stitched around with a tight zig zag stitch.

I knew I wanted borders. This quilt had to have borders because I wanted it to add a special message for my niece. It's really her message. It is how she thinks of each and every customer she deals with in her photography business. The lettering is from QuietPlay's Craftsy pattern Just My Type lowercase pattern.

You are raven. Her first name happens to be Raven. I hope she knows that the message she delivers in her business applies so accurately to her as well.

Deciding on the quilting design is always the most challenging part of a project for me. I thought about doing some sort of camera-centric design on each block, but in the end, decided to go for texture. The blocks really speak for themselves. Rather than free motion stitch wavy lines, I used a decorative scallop stitch on my sewing machine and quilted each line with my walking foot. I started with five or six lines of stitching on a row of blocks, but could see that it really needed more to have a defined texture. Each row of cameras has twelve rows of stitching. This sort of quilting is tough on the shoulders if too much is done in a sitting, so I set myself a goal of completing one row of cameras a day. Even then, I usually did six rows in the morning and six rows at night.

Swirls are quilted in the negative space in the border. I love swirls and it had been a while since I quilted any. Each of the four corners is quilted with one giant swirl.

Small meander quilting was done all around the letters to make them stand out a little more. The binding is a dark teal that is also used in a couple of camera blocks.

Rather than perpetuate the camera theme on the back, I looked for backing fabric that emphasized another of my niece's interests, Renaissance fairs. She loves a good costume and in addition to attending them regularly, she worked at one for several years. I sent her mom several suggestions for backing fabric and she liked this one right away. I was really nervous about the quilting being too busy for the backing, but since I went with a blue thread for the quilting, I think it avoids overwhelming the print of the fabric. This fabric is Magic - Castle Plans in Navy by Sarah Jane for Michael Miller.

The finished quilt is 70" x 85".

Camera Quilt - A New Project For An Almost New Year

There was a plan. I was going to finish up my holiday sewing and then slow down with the quilt making for the first couple of months of the year. My sewing room is in an upstairs bonus room so I am away from the core activity of the household. I planned to sit by the fire and read and cross stitch and crochet and just relax and be more visible and available.

While this plan was being made other conversations happened and I found myself committed to five quilting projects for the upcoming year. I did not over commit at all. The first is not even on the horizon until late spring. But the seeds had been planted and I could not stop thinking about these new quilts just waiting to be born. The design for one had been set in my brain so why not pull some fabric for it?

And why not make a test block to see if the mind and the quilt were in alignment? After looking at this block for a day or two, I decided that more lens and less camera would look better, and I lengthened the rectangle on the top left just a little. I also narrowed the side and bottom borders to match the top border.

After all of that, I just had to make a few more blocks to get a better idea of how these blocks were going to look all together. The color of this quilt is supposed to come across as teal and in the beginning I was staying very true to that. It made for a boring quilt. There needed to be pops of other colors throughout to keep it interesting.

The camera lens is what brings life to these blocks. They are quite boring to me without it. At some point, I am going to have to do something about securing the lenses. They are fused on for now. I will probably zigzag or blanket stitch around them by machine. Still thinking about that.

I went back through my stash again to pull a wider range of colors. Then I grouped them. Each camera needs a body, lens, and background. I think I have about 50 fabric sets ready to go.

I am cutting them in groups, then piecing them three at a time. I can stitch together three blocks each morning before leaving for work.

As of this morning, I have 20 blocks pieced. The original plan was to do eight blocks across and ten blocks down, but I did not like eight across. Six seems better, so we will go with that for a while. Each block will finish at 10 inches x 7 1/2 inches.

What I thought was going to be a project for the spring, and one that was going to be worked on over time with a few blocks here and a few blocks there, seems to have taken on a life of its own. I'm okay with that. The new year isn't even here yet. There will be lots of time for fires and reading and relaxation, just as soon as I stitch up a few more camera blocks.