the Forever Quilt

It's finally finished!

And it took forever, so that's one of the reasons that this quilt is named "the Forever Quilt".  I pieced in May/June, started the quilting in October, continued in November...and the pulled it off the frame, and just got it finished now in February.


This quilt is from a Craftsy class, Machine Quilting with Templates, taught by Kim Brunner.  I highly recommend this class, and any class you can get from Kim Brunner.  She's a fantastic teacher.  The quilt pattern is from alyciaquilts, she does marvelous work with Quilts of Valor.
You may remember this quilt from a few earlier blogposts...first seen here and then more on my design choices.


So, after being disappointed in November with how adding the bubbles background competed with the 1/4" lines of the stars, I pondered for a while, and decided I wasn't picking anything out, as this is a "learning" quilt.  I knew the issue was scale, so I went back and basically meandered/scribbled near the star lines to fix that. 

Hooray, it worked.  the stars are defined again!

And so I continued, this time doing a tight meander near the stars before adding bubbles.

And then, because it's a learning quilt, I wanted to learn/improve different background fills, so I had fun in the different areas (and once again wished I had made a slightly different design choice, by bubbling in a smaller area, but that's just another lesson learned)

McTavishing... I added a row of tiny bubbles around the star rays in all of these background areas, again to make sure that those 1/4" lines were defined.

 

Worms

 Curls

Spirals

 

 Bubbles

 Mussels--from Renae Haddadin--it was nice to have her new book to remind me of the designs learned in a class from Renae in 2011.

and E's and 3's

 And in the right lighting, even the border work shows!  (lesson:  to much work for a busy border print)

 I've always been thrilled with the diamonds in the green  border.

 The quilting shrunk the quilt by 2" in width and 2" in length.  So it is now 56"x78".  Quilters Dream wool batt.  SoFine thread, 15 bobbins.

 

And in the end, I am THRILLED with how it turned out.  

And I've even got the quilting showing on the back now too...I'm not sure why I picked this backing, well, I do know why...because of color, but I usually choose a much plainer backing and the quilting would have showed so much more...

I call this my forever quilt, because it took me 'forever' and because it's going to live with someone who has been a friend forever....and then I read of a show quilt, where the maker spent just about as much time just on the binding as I spent on the quilting of this quilt...I'm pretty sure I don't have the patience for show quilting, LOL.


And speaking of binding, and in keeping with the learning theme of this quilt,  I used a 'new to me' binding technique, the blog I saw it on called it "Susie's Magic Binding"

I usually use Ricky Tim's piped binding, or a traditional double-fold binding that is handsewn to the back.  Susie's Magic Binding, like the Ricky Tim's method, allows for the binding to be sewn entirely by machine, but uses less fabric than the Ricky Tims and the method is faster.  I'll have to use this method a few more times before I can say for sure which I like best,  but I certainly liked this.  Binding was probably the fastest part about this quilt :)  A few hours, from start to finish.