When I introduced The Ladies’ Stitching Club yesterday, I alluded to the quilt I designed for the collection. I’ve been having so much fine slowly working on mine this summer that I wanted to share my work in progress with you.
To start, here’s the illustration of the fully finished project. I’m not there yet, but I’m well along the way.
The illustrations are never as good as the real thing, are they? Let’s try this. Not a great photo, but I think it helps a bit. The quilt isn’t finished, but you get the idea.
The quilt is a free pattern (just click on that link to download it), and I’m still quilting mine. I’ve been spending some of the hottest evenings this summer watching old movies and quilting it by hand with pearl cotton in the comfort of the air conditioning. I plan to cover the entire quilt with rows and rows of running stitch, so I guess it’s a good thing we ran out of sample yardage and had to keep the quilt itself small. Because I’m running out of summer evenings. I’m calling this one a lap quilt, especially since it’s spent a lot of time on my lap already. I love the texture of a heavily quilted quilt, and this one is very satisfying. I think it will be even better once it’s been washed and softened up a bit, with all the lovely puckering that happens as the batting shrinks up a bit. You know what I mean. See? Halfway quilted. Lots more evenings to go.
S and I had an indoor doll picnic on it yesterday just to test things out, and it got the nod of approval from everyone who participated.
I love how this quilt comes together. You might be surprised to learn that it’s strip pieced! And when you trim the pieces you’re left with some extra triangle pairings that can be assembled for the simple little triangle quilt that I just pieced together yesterday, below. I’m thinking about naming it the Byproduct Quilt, since it’s a little bonus you wouldn’t expect, made with the leftovers and not much extra work. I haven’t decided what to do with it yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
And while I’m thinking of it, several of these photos are from Instagram, which I really wasn’t intending to like because I feel like, between blogging, flickr, twitter, pinterest and facebook the last thing I needed in my life is a little more social media. But I started playing with it a couple of weeks ago and love it! It’s like twitter for photos. Or like fast blogging, which is all I seem to have time for these days anyway. If you want to join me, I’m @lieslgibson. It’s a great exercise in looking, and I try to post something every day. I’ll be posting photos of Iceland while we’re there for the next couple of weeks, so join me and come along!