Quilts!

I've taken up quilting in the last year or so, because I really need another craft in my life.  It's actually sort of fun, and I have a lot of scrap fabric that I can't use for costumes or much of anything else.  Using it for quilts, I feel like I'm being a good hippie and reducing trash.  Of course, I also end up buying a lot of quilting fabrics but I was doing that anyway, I just didn't have much to do with the fabrics I was getting.

Anyway, the first real quilt I did was a gift for my brother last year.  This summer, I finished #2 and #3.  I'm quite pleased with how they turned out, though I need to get better at the machine quilting part of the process.  Trying to wrangle a 70 inch square quilt through my machine is tricky and I ended up with some funny little bubbles on the backside.  Using the walking foot on my machine helped a lot, I suspect the rest is just a matter of practice.

The first quilt is lap or throw sized, I didn't really bother to measure it but I think it's about 50x60 or so.  The whole thing is done in nice cozy flannel, so it's very soft and will be great this winter.  The dog loves it already.  The piecing was easy, but for some reason the the boarders at the top and bottom get a little stretched out so they don't lay right.  I think the flannel may have stretched some when I was piecing it and I didn't really notice until I was doing the quilting.  The whole thing is scribble quilted, which was fun to do and worked well except for where the boarders didn't fit right and in one spot towards the end where things puckered.


The second quilt was even easier to piece, though the way the pattern was written a lot of waste was produced.  This made me upset, but the end result is nice so I can sort of let it go.  All of the fabrics are Asian-inspired prints I've been collecting over the last year or so.  The whole thing sort of reminds me of the trip I took to Kyoto in 2008.  I wasn't sure about the colors and prints together, but in the end it looks pretty and I'm very pleased with it.  For the actual quilting, I just stitched in the ditch, which created a really nice diamond pattern on the back.  The whole thing is a 70 inch square and I wasn't feeling comfortable with my quilt-wrestling skills to try free motion quilting on this.

Now that these two are done, I'm working a smaller piece that's based on a shoji screen quilt I saw I one of the local fabric stores.  It's going to be a gift for a good friend who just bought her first home.  The top is all put together, I just need to decided on a backing and do the quilting.  Because the colors are so high-contrast I'm having a hard time deciding how to quilt it.  I think I may try some of the invisible filament thread they have now and do free motion scribbling on it.  We'll see.  I'll post pictures one it's done and sent off.