Bloggers’ Quilt Festival 2012

I thought I would throw my hat into the ring at the last-minute for this springs Bloggers’ Quilt Festival hosted by  Amy’s Creative Side.  I wasn’t sure which quilt I would enter, but decided on my Lily Pond quilt since I haven’t done a blog post about it previously.

Lily Pond

This quilt is a small wall hanging that is about 28″ x 20″ and the pattern is from Ruth B. McDowell’s Piecing Workshop book. When I first received this book my husband, who I like to call my “Chief Creative Consultant”, saw the quilt in the book and said that I had to make it for our house. I agreed, but I wasn’t promising exactly when.

About a year ago I was let go from my job and needed something to fill my time. We also were having a couple of bathroom make overs done so that meant many hours spent sequestered in a couple of rooms on the first floor of our house while the work was done upstairs. I decided that this would be a good project to occupy my time while the work was done.

It may be a small quilt, but there are about 87 million pieces in it.  Okay that is a bit of an exaggeration, but there are a lot of pieces and some of them were very small.  My Chief Creative Consultant was very helpful with picking out fabrics and helping decide where to put which fabrics. Ruth McDowell uses a technique for piecing where you use freezer paper to create all the template pieces, mark them so you know where they go and how to match them up with the pieces next to them, and then iron the freezer paper pieces to the fabric and cut them out with a 1/4 inch seam allowance added.

The pattern is actually fairly easy to piece together, but you have to keep your concentration while you are working on it. I had all the pieces cut out with the freezer paper on them and pinned to my design wall. It is pieced together in sections that are marked on the pattern.  It was great fun to watch the quilt grow as the sections were pieced together.

For the quilting I used a variety of thread colors and design depending on which area I was quilting.  I actually quilted the water area twice as I over did the density of the stitching the first time.  I had to painstakingly pull out all of the stitches in this area and redid it and I’m glad I did. I had some fun with the quilting too and added a couple of frogs on the lily pads.

You can click on the images to see the details.

I like to finish off my quilts with a machine embroidered label.

 

My husband loves the way the quilt turned out and it is prominently displayed in the busiest room in the house, our family room.  On top of that I also entered this quilt in the Perinton Quilt Guild show a couple of weeks ago and by popular vote it won first place in the small wall hanging category!

I hope you like my entry for the Bloggers’ Quilt Festival. You can hop over to Amy’s Creative Side to see all the other quilts entered in the show.