Pictures of Kentuckii Botanica

I finally gave this quilt to my friend for her 50th birthday, a couple of weeks late as they were away on holidays.  I hope she likes it.

I finished it in 2012 and I still love this quilt.  Most of the blocks have been quilted using different fillers from Leah Day's website.  She has great tutorials and helped me immensely in quilting my first bed quilt using Fmq.  I cannot thank Linzi Upton (the maker of the original quilt) or Leah Day enough.

Photos of each of the blocks are below, just so I don't forget the variety.  Rather than a label, I quilted the details into the border of the quilt, surrounded by the January FMQ leaf pattern.  My crazy feathers block was from the Diane Gaudisky challenge.

Finished!

The quilt is done. It's a wet and cold day, so no good picture of the finished quilt. I started this quilt four months ago and have worked on it every day. I am glad it is done.

Here is a photo of the binding going on.  You can see my sewing machine is very basic and old.

Borders on botannica

The side borders are now on. I'm undecided if it's more problematic to quilt an entire queen size quilt in a machine with a six inch harp or to do it as qayg. I'm not convinced that qayg ends up with a flat quilt once you add the borders, as they get added first and then get quilted, ending up with the dreaded shrinkage. Still, I'm happy that there should only be a couple of weeks left in this quilt. I've been either planning, sewing or quilting it since February. I still love it.

I've joined all three columns and included a new panel at the base.  Here's a photo of halfway through quilting the new base panel.  My sewing machine is making strange noises and I've had a lot of thread breaks.  Looks like I'll have to send it off for a service.

All joined up - side border still has to be added

All blocks done

Hooray, I've finally finished quilting the blocks. Now to join up the columns. I'm a bit nervous about how well this might go. I suspect pins and I are about to become good friends. Rather than adding sashing at the back of the quilt to join the blocks, I'm going to try using the overhang of the backing. I've trimmed this down to 3/4 inch and will use sashing on the front of the quilt - 2 inches wide and folded in half? Wish me luck.

Progress

I finished quilting three blocks this weekend, as well as finally getting rid of the concrete base of our poor broken clothesline and concreting in a new one.

Only four more blocks to quilt before I have to make a decision on whether or not I need to add more blocks to make the quit bigger.  I'm not overly happy with my quilting this weekend.

Lollipop chain - I'm not really happy with my attempt

Mario vine

Sea Oats

The rest of the first panel

Swirling flames

Trailing spirals

Pebbles

Stipple/meander

Paisley

Shadow waves (but it didn't work out like that)

The first panel completed :)

More FMQ blocks

More of my Fmq blocks

Echo Shell

Pumpkin Patch

Fern and Stem

H2O

Basic Spiral

Quilting (qayg) the quilt - part 1

I've been following Leah Day's tutorials on FMQ and decided to use some of her design ideas on this quilt and use a different design on most of the blocks..

Etch and Sketch (beetle details tba)

Trailing tears

Starting the quilt

I think I might be challenging myself a bit with this quilt. For starters, the base fabric is duck cloth, which I later found out is NOT recommended for quilting. It frays a LOT! So I cut the blocks at 13 inches, with a plan to cut them down to 12.5 once I finished the appliqué. Each block had to be zig zagged to reduce the fraying.I've never appliqued before and hadn't done quilt as you go or much free motion quilting. Oh well, nothing like a challenge.

Botanica Kentuckii

I decided to make a quilt for a friend's 50th birthday. After looking for a quilt pattern that would work with green as the primary colour (her favourite), I found a beautiful quilt named Botanica
Kentuckii by Linzi Upton.  Linzi kindly agreed to my using her quilt as a pattern.

http://www.thequiltquine.com/ 

Linzi's Botanica Kentuckii