Sunday, October 18, 2015

Completed: 4th Terminus quilt

The quilt is done and has been out of the house for over a week. Success.

This is the first quilt I have "finished" the quilting for and put through the wash. Yikes, what a heart attack! I was not prepared for the state it came out of the wash in and almost burst into tears. Turns out A) quilt batting holds a fuck ton of water and B) light colored fabric is SUPER transparent when wet. Thankfully one of SF's little mini October heat waves helped shed the water and the fabric returned to it's opaque state upon drying. Those first couple moments though... All the track stitching was done in red and while I clipped the threads, I didn't trim them back as short as I should have. Which meant that veins of red creeped out from the tracks when it was wet and all the character portraits had spider webs of black thread behind them.

Quilting

I'm shocked to say the quilting process was rather fun. And this is the first time I've abandoned the use of a frame and just quilted in my lap. Would not do so for the primary stitching lines that holds everything in place (yay for having a quilt frame for that!!) but for the "filler" stitching, it worked well. While I continue to swear that "the next time" I'm shipping the damn thing off to be machine quilted by professionals, I do find it to be quite appealing to add custom stitches specific to the quilt design. Used masking tape to help guide the lines, and that proved to be very useful. Have also used masking tape to guide applique sewing (because I suck at pinning), so that stuff is turning out to be a vital to have on hand.

The bare minimum Quilting

The back of the quilt was more complicated than it needed to be/should have been. For some reason I thought "Wow, this is waaaay too nerdy looking! It needs a stealth mode where you can flip it over and it doesn't look so... silly." So I did some minor slap-dash squares in a variety of fabrics. The rushed sewing job (and non-cotton fabric types) meant that it didn't lay perfectly flat, which became most noticeable when the quilting chased down all those wrinkles and pinned them in place. Oh well. This will be yet another flaw lost in the sea of detailed-stuff-going-on. On the up side, the station stitching clearly shows through the back of the quilt which I find to be quite fetching. Makes the effort of hand stitching such details more worth it.

Quilt Back

And now, don't make fun of me, I'll confess I've started a sample square as a proof-of-concept for next quilt*... Poor Adam was a bit sad to see the 4T one leave- it's one of the few I've made that was large enough to cover him. So we talked a bit and kicked around a very Adam-specific idea that I'm pretty excited about. And again it's overly complex, very specific, will take forever, and will probably require hand quilting... I'm so excited!!

* I have not forgotten that I've plans for another 4T quilt for another individual! But that one actually requires the game to end before I can start on it so this one is... like... an exceptionally complicated palate cleanser...

Quilt Top

You can check out more photos over at the Flickr album.

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