It's always a food event!

My intention was to make a quilt for my wonderful husband to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in November 2015.  We had taken our first cruise to Bermuda in June of that year to celebrate our anniversary and I took hundreds of pictures of that trip.  So I changed my mind and made him a picture book with many of the pictures and lots of descriptions of the event.  Now that I had all of the fabrics, I decided to make the quilt for him for Christmas.  We have a rule that we don't buy each other gifts for Christmas, but I figured making him a quilt didn't count as a purchased gift. 

There is a back story to this quilt.  My husband loves to eat, especially when we go somewhere.  Where ever we go, we always need to find a place to eat.  Doesn't matter if it's breakfast, lunch or dinner!  We have a standing joke that every place we go is a "food event", or needs to be! 

So, I started collecting food fabrics.  You name the food, I found fabric for it.  Liver is the only food he will not NEVER eat!  It took a while, but I was able to get 82 different foods.  My biggest issue was finding fat quarters.  I certainly didn't need very large pieces of each fabric, even a fat quarter gave me more than I needed for the blocks.  I did find some at quilt shows and I found a good number online, especially at the www.4my3boyz.com site.  They had all the foods I needed by the FQ.  Many were on sale, but their prices were great.  My husband is used to seeing boxes and bags of fabrics on our doorstep so I had them delivered right under his nose.  He often brought the packages to me not knowing he would eventually be sleeping under them! 

So the fabrics were chosen, now what pattern should I use? 

I thought about the illusion block that would make them look like the blocks were floating.  I made a few blocks but then discovered that quilt would turn out to be bigger than I had planned.  I wanted a large lap that would cover him in his recliner at the cabin but it also needed to cover our Kirby dog who always sleep at this feet.  I went with the "KISS" method and sewed the blocks together with the columns offset.  That let the blocks show off by themselves and eliminated the need to match seams. 

Next I had to decide about borders, backing and binding.  I needed to keep the backing on the masculine side and wanted to pick that before I decided on the border.  Not as easy as I thought.  Then I went to the quilt show in Oaks, PA and found the perfect fabric - I bought all they had.  So now with the backing, I found a good color for the borders.  Black was the obvious choice for the binding. 

I was able to get the top done complete with borders, the backing cut and sewn to size and the binding made but did not have enough time to get it to the long armer in time for Christmas.  I packed them all together and gave it to him nicely packaged!  It went to the quilter at Olde City Quilts as soon as the holiday was over.  Six weeks later, he was sleeping under it! 

Finished top laying on the backing fabric

 

Backing fabric with border fabric.  The backing fabric is all different soda caps!

Almost done!

 

He was shocked, but he loved it! 

 

 

I decided to have the quilting done in circles to match the shape of the bottle caps on the backing fabric.  It turned out great! 

 

 

So now, where ever we are, it will ALWAYS be a food event! 

 

 

 

APQ 2016 February UFO - Update!

As predicted, I needed all 29 days in February to meet my deadline.  Of course, a trip to Florida was thrown into the mix with very short notice. 

But, I finished my UFO! 

 

This was a class project that I took at the Quilter's Barn around 2003, if memory serves me correctly. It is the Lasagna pattern from the Spring Cleaning book by Atkinson Designs.  Lots of good scrap busting projects in this book!  When this project was chosen as the UFO for February,  I did not realize that the top was mostly complete except for the three borders, but they were already cut.  I needed to cut the backing to size though.  Now most folks, including me, thought this would be an easy, peasy project to finish!  Well, not so much! 

 

Here's what I learned from this quilt:

 

I need to remember for the next time that I need a larger surface if I want to spray baste a larger quilt.  This one ended up being 60" x 70" and my work table is only 48" x 60".  A bit to small for what I needed to do.  I started out on the table but eventually moved to the floor.  I still prefer to spray baste, but not on my knees, and not on my cement garage floor!  I must shop for a larger table! 

 

As a rule, I don't do bias bindings.  I think I have only been successful at making a few one so far.  Since this was a Christmas project and there really wasn't much I needed to do to complete it, I thought I would throw in a level of difficulty and make a bias binding from red and white striped fabric to give it a candy cane look.  Before I cut any fabric, I watched some many, many You Tube videos and looked through my reference sheets.  I finally bit the bullet and made the first cut!  I was surprised at how well it turned out on the first attempt.  My confidence got a big boost so I may try this again soon! 

 

 

Finally, in my attempt to do more machine quilting on my smaller projects, I thought long and hard on how to quilt this project.  I resisted doing stitch in the ditch since I wanted the quilting to break up all the linearity of the quilt.  I had recently taken a machine quilting class and learned, among other things, how to do cross hatch quilting.  I thought this would enhance the horizontal and vertical seams.  I used my walking foot on my newish Bernina along with the stitching guides to make my quilting lines 2 inches apart.  I cross hatched the quilt from edge to edge.  I was pleased at the result so now I have another quilting technique in my tool box!  I attached the binding by machine as well, using a decorative stitch.  I need to practice on this technique for future projects.  I love the hand stitched binding technique but I was running out of runway for this project.  It will do for a quilt I will have out for two weeks a year. 

 

The UFO for March will be my lighthouse wall hanging.  The top is done.  The backing is already cut.  I need to make the binding.  Then the top can be sandwiched and quilted.  That's as far as I have gotten on this one.  I would like to say it should not be a difficult finish, but I don't want to jinx myself! 

 

2 UFOs done, 10 to go! 

 

Stay tuned!