Saturday, November 30, 2019

anxious for fall

Finally finished! Technically it's still fall ... the season for which this quilt was intended, but we are quickly moving into the holidays so it may have to hibernate until next season. Still, it turned out great as a first quilt in the new craft room and a housewarming gift from me to us. I love fall colors, decorating for fall, brisk fall days, and this seemed like a nice reminder of both that and the fact that we finally found a place to call our own this year. 


The batik I chose (online!) for the back turned out perfectly. Some of the prints and colors on the front were a little out of the box for 'autumn' but the awesome orange backing balances it out nicely and takes the piece firmly into the autumnal look I was hoping for. I'm calling it "Anxious for Fall" because, while moving was exciting and the achievement of a long awaited life goal for us, it was also a very trying and anxious time for me. I can recall working on some of these blocks on a couple of days where I just "couldn't even". It seems funny to commemorate something like that, but if I can laugh at it in retrospect then it doesn't seem so bad. 


I was going to do some hand quilting with pearl cotton, just a couple of lines of rusty orange to make my reference 'x' for the V shaped quilting, but I couldn't find the color at any of my local shops and didn't want to chance picking a color from my computer screen. So instead I did all machine sewing, including the orange 'x'. The color I finally picked for the majority of the quilting is a gray with a greenish undertone. There are so many shades of gray aren't there? Somehow this shade seemed more toned down to me than the bluer or truer grays. It took me an evening to get the quilting done, and wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be in terms of maneuvering the quilt through my machine.


I made a scrappy-ish binding from two of the Indie prints with more orange in them. Scrappy-ish meaning I used up the first print first than added strips of the second. I'm pretty sure I had just enough to get the binding done, so that's pretty perfect for stash busting purposes. It's about 90" x 60", so a really good size. 


I had intended to do some hand quilting in the tan colored border, but the aforementioned challenge of finding the right color thread makes me think I'll leave it alone. Maybe some day, but it looks really nice just plain too. I really like the way the thin inner border turned out. I normally don't think of putting borders on quilts, mainly in order to keep them looking more modern vs traditional. But in this case even with the borders and traditional churn dash blocks this piece still looks pretty modern to me! I'm very happy with how it turned out and looking forward to getting some good use out of it. 

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