Old Stash

In my last post I said I would share the latest version of my snowball quilt. I was determined to finish this before I left on my summer holiday. This quilt is made entirely with old stash and to be honest not all of it was mine. Quilting friends generously opened their stash to me so that I could get the best solids to encircle my string piecing. Except for the white and grey this quilt was made from old stash.

When I was playing with my EQ designing the pattern for this quilt, I did two different versions. I did bright circles on grey and white backgrounds but I really love the idea of combining two backgrounds making a border with the darker background.

This quilt was hanging on the wall for a day when I noticed didn’t quilt the pebbles in one spot – can you find it? I had checked it so many times to clip threads I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen the missing pebbles. I had to reload the quilt and quilt that last bit. Check out the closeup of the quilting! There is a lot of ruler work on this quilt, that is when I found out how accurate my stitching was or not!

Custom quilting takes a lot of time and patience, a lot of colour changes, and a lot of sweeping up stray threads. Since this was my own quilt I didn’t keep track of the time as well as I normally would. If you are curious, this was well over 20 hours of work. Custom quilting will cost on average 3 times or more the price of quilting a pantograph.

Not all quilts need custom quilting, but when there is a lot of solid fabric it is great to make the extra time and effort. I hope you will think of me when you want the quilting to “Make” the quilt.