A finish.....and just in time, too!

Well.....last night I was sewing on the binding of Jeanne's wedding quilt.  Today it is all washed, crinkled to perfection, and I will be wrapping it up when I finish posting this!

Whew!  And it's just in the nick of time!  The wedding is Saturday, and we are heading down to Massachusetts tomorrow, to do some visiting with other friends before the wedding weekend.

I have to admit.....I really did like working on this quilt!  I had never done many flying geese before, and this one had 480 of them in it!  Turns out, I really like making flying geese!  Who knew!?!

I learned a few things on this quilt, too!  My biggest lesson......if I'm using a particular thread color for the quilting, make sure it's a brand and color that A LOT of quilt shops carry!  Turns out......there is only ONE shop within 2 hours of me that carries the Mettler Silk Finish All Cotton #577 (a medium/dark lavender) thread.  I purchased 2 spools (the big ones with 547 yards on them) and started quilting.  When I realized I was going to need more, I headed back, bought another spool, and it turned out, it was their last one!

"That's ok.......this should do it!"

Well.......no!

When I had just finished the initial feather on the border, I was at the end of that third spool!  I felt this feather needed to have the echo quilting around it.  I just didn't feel right leaving that area unquilted.  I didn't have any other unquilted areas, and it would just bother me!

So I called, and they had it on order, and expected it at any time (this was last Thursday).  I figured, I can wait until.....Tuesday, then I could quickly finish the quilting on Tues, bind on Wed, wash and wrap it up on Thursday......it would cut it close, but I could do it!

The thing is......they didn't get their shipment in on Tuesday!  So on Tuesday, hubby and I drove ALL OVER to try and find a suitable 'match' of another brand!  We checked 3 other quilt shops, the fabric warehouse store, Marden's, and JoAnn's!  My hubby is an amazing guy.....and what a trooper!  He was even helping to match the colors!  We bought threads at 3 different places, all of them pretty darned close to the Mettler color, but all of them were poly!  Ugh!  It seems NO ONE carries any all cotton thread in any colors other than neutrals!  What the heck is with that!?!  I guess I've been buying my threads from Connecting Threads for so long now, that I just assumed all cotton was available all over the place!

Anyway, I tried all 3 brands on my tester sandwich, and picked the closest one!  And since it is just the echo stitching around the feather, the fact that it is slightly thinner than the cotton actually works out ok.  The echo fades to the background, and the initial feather gets to stand out more!  I'm ok with that!

So.....here are pics of Jeanne's quilt!  The label sentiment is from their wedding invitation.

Oh, and another thing I learned on this quilt.....I need a new camera really bad!  This pic is the truest of the colors of the quilt.  Everything else is either too dark or too light to what the real colors are.  That makes me crazy!

I love making that swirly chain down the white border.  I did NOT love making the 1/2 inch lines down the inside border.....the stitch in the ditch with dark thread next to the white fabric was murder!  I'll never do that again!  I do like how it looks though!

Turning the corner!  This was my second time making a feather border.....and I really love how it looks!  The first quilt I did it on, I made the feather way too small, so when it was washed and crinkled up, it just disappeared in the crinkles.  I made this one with feathers the size of my thumb, so it was big enough.

This is the overall quilting design I did in the center area.  Freehand swirls with feather edges.  I really love this design, and will use it again and again.  I fills an area very easily, and is fairly fast, too.  And this was my other lesson learned on this quilt.....if the quilt has large pieces of a lot of different fabrics with patterns , just do an all over design.  I struggled trying to decide what to quilt in each large square, and it turns out, because of the fabrics, the quilting doesn't even show up in most of them.  It's just quilty-puckery!  If I had tried to create some perfect design in there, it would have been lost!  So, unless I'm quilting on a solid or reads-as-solid fabric, there is no reason for individual quilt designs for each square.  I'm so glad I didn't do feathered wreaths!  Eek!

Now I can start playing with my cruise quilt again.  I just need to finish up the borders!  I have not touched it in over a month, and Bonnie is on the second cruise right now!  I hope to finish it next week, so I can post it the minute they return!

Hope you have a really great weekend!  I'm going to have cake!  Yay!

regan