Explore - A Finished Word Quilt

Have you ever been in the fabric store minding your own business and then you walk by the cutting table and see something someone else is purchasing and suddenly it becomes a must have? That does not happen to me often, but it did with the map fabric that borders this quilt.

My husband loves old maps and I knew this fabric would be perfect to use in a project for him.

We live in Georgia so I made sure to fussy cut the border strips to capture our home state.

That map fabric has been hanging around for a couple of years and right after I brought it home, I paired it up with this dark brown solid. At that time, I was taking a Craftsy class about quilting with your walking foot. One of the techniques was to matchstick quilt around letters, causing the empty space for the letters to stand out. I loved the result but was not such a fan of matchstick quilting. The result is beautiful, but it is a slow and kind of boring process. I decided to try a small free motion meander for this project.

The first step was to choose a font. I chose something straight from the selection in my word processing software and blew it up to a size 500 font. I printed the letters, then traced them on wax paper with the shiny side down. I centered and lined up the letters and pinned them in place. With the letters pinned, I cut the dark brown to the right size and cut and stitched the borders in place. Once the top was complete, I removed the pins from each letter, one at a time, and pressed the wax paper to the quilt top.

Next, the quilt was layered using two layers of batting. Once the letters were pressed down, I had to be really careful. The wax paper is just sticky enough to stay in place but it comes loose quickly if manipulated too much. The quilting is stitched in a dark brown thread. Each piece of wax paper was removed once the outline of the letter was completed.

I am very happy with the result. The biggest challenge was to keep the meander small so that the letters would really stand out.

If I could change one thing on this project, it would be to choose a lighter fabric for the letters. The light has to be just right for the letters to show.

Without the right light, it looks like a boring dark brown rectangle.

See how much more the letters stand out on the back? Part of this is because of the lighter fabric and part of it is because the thread is much darker than the fabric so all of the quilting stands out more. The lighting is terrible in this picture. The fabric looks gray but it is really a pretty blue.

I thought this would hang on the wall but after seeing it on our living room coffee table and knowing that this room gets lots of light throughout the day, I think we will leave it right there as a table runner.

This project was on my list for both 2017 and 2018. It was a last minute decision to take the plunge and get it made. I knew my husband would like it so it became a Valentine's Day gift for him. We don't generally go for all the commercial hoopla surrounding holidays so sometimes there is a gift and sometimes there isn't. We know we love each other all the time and that is what really matters. This year seems to be an exception though as he surprised me with two mugs to add to my growing Fiesta ware set of dishes.

This project was completed in six hours. The finished size is 34 x 15 inches.

Linking up to Finish It Up Friday with Crazy Mom Quilts.

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".