What I've been working on

I have 5 quilts entered in our guild's show and none of them have been finished yet! I have until February 28th to finish up, so hopefully I have enough time. Several of them just need sleeves and labels but my seahorse quilt "George & Gracie" had not even been quilted when I submitted the registration form.

I started the quilt in a class with Susan Carlson last year at Asilomar. I've decided I don't particularly like the construction technique and will not use it again. We cut the fabric shapes we wanted and lightly glued them to a muslin base. Once the image was completed a layer of tulle was stitched over it and then it was sewn onto the background. There are way too many raw edges that are fraying along the edges of the seahorses and I'm thinking I'm going to have to use fray check or something to seal them off. I hate to go that route, but I have to do something.



I started quilting this and it wasn't working. I'd used a really bad batt - which I thought when I purchased was Warm and Natural but it wasn't - and the design wasn't great. I decided to rip the entire thing out and start over with a new batt.

I flipped through several books and came across an interesting idea in the book "Quilting Makes the Quilt." It's supposed to look like seaweed and air bubbles under water. Not sure I succeeded.

I thought I had a brilliant idea of first drawing out the quilting outline design on tracing paper and then actually stitching through the paper onto the quilt. So I wouldn't be picking little bits of paper out of the stitching I used a large basting stitch - which was probably a mistake. I think it would have all come together better if the outline stitching had been tighter. Oh well, another lesson learned. (click photos for large view)



I need to figure out how to bind this. The background fabric was a one yard piece I had in my stash so I don't have any more for a binding. I'll probably end up just facing it.