Phew! It's been a while since I posted which is kind of funny seeing as I had planned on posting twice a week originally ha ha! And it's been a long while since I had a finish! Many years ago I went to Spotlight and hidden away in a corner was a stash of packets of these quilt kits. They'd obviously been around a while as the packaging was torn and they'd been reduced in price several times. I don't believe I'd ever bought a kit at that point and thought I'd give it a try. Now I wish I'd bought the whole pile of them but never mind. The kit included the fabric for the top and the binding plus an acrylic Dresden template.
I made the top fairly soon after I bought the kit and basted it because I decided that I wanted to hand quilt it with a cross hatch design using embroidery floss. This, of course, explains why this is such an old UFO. Hand quilting ha ha ha ha ha! In what lifetime was I ever going to do that?!
Years passed and I bought a quilting frame and I searched my studio for a project worthy of being the first to do on the frame. I have plenty of tops to choose from. I had lots without batting, others without backing and then some without the right thread. This is starting to sound like Goldilocks and the three bears! But this one was just right. Ha ha! I unpicked the basting stitches and did a bit of work to get it ready for the frame and then I thought I'd be really clever and design my own digital quilting pattern for the Dresden blades. The plan was to do some fancy design in the blade and something else in the circle and then an all over circle design over the rest of it with a repeat of the design in the Dresden centre randomly placed within a few of the background circles. It made complete sense to me!
This is the design I came up with for the blades. I was so pleased with myself when after watching a billion videos and with much trial, error and swearing I managed to draw it in pattern cad.
Then I was stumped because I couldn't place my design in the right position. I almost threw in the towel but I came up with this template to help me position each design on the blade using four points.
Ta da! It worked! Well, kind of. After doing all that work I realised that it was going to take forever to position then sew each blade and for each blade I'd have threads to bury which I'd happily do if the design didn't fade into my fabric! It was definitely not worth the effort! So I unpicked it and did an edge to edge!
My least favourite part. Hand sewing the binding.
And finally after all that chatter here is the finished quilt! I did crop it to remove my feet from the picture but the original uploaded so I'm going to leave it as it tickles me!
Here's a shot of my quilted bubbles. It wasn't quite what I expected but it worked out in the end.
So what's next I wonder?
