Yippee I’m a winner!

My quilt “Unfurling” took first place in the Innovative Pieced category at the IQA show in Houston TX last week. I feel very humble and honored to have received such a wonderful award. Here I am grinning ear to ear with the quilt at the awards ceremony. My mom would be SO proud. She was always my first and best advocate.

I know you are like me and like to know all the dirty little details about things so here are a few tidbits about the making of this quilt.

I had this design on my design wall for over five years. I looked at it every day. I could not decide on color choices for this design. I just kept fiddling with the color choices until I finally just STARTED the design. Sometimes you just have to jump in with both feet and go.

This is a completely PIECED quilt. I used a freezer paper template technique to make the whole quilt, border included. I have two patterns that use this technique if you want to give it a try, you can find them on my website under SHOP and then Patterns and Kits.

The first is a little Leaf Mug Rug single leaf design with two different pattern shapes. One of the mug rugs has a twig border.
The second pattern that uses this technique is my Falling Leaves wall quilt.

Each of these patterns includes two different patterns along with written directions and pictures to help you along the way as you construct the projects . I LOVE THIS Technique and will be using it much more in the future.

Before I can begin any project I must first dye the fabric. Since I use only my own hand dyed cotton and silks in my work I have to start there. I choose to use one of my favorite color gradations, blue to lime green for the back ground of the quilt and to off set the leaves I choose bright bold orange, magenta, fuchsia and red. The border colors carry over from the background fabric and then is interspersed with a green gradation from true green to limey green for the heart shapes, which kinda echo a leaf shape.

The actual piecing of the quilt was done over the course of a summer. The quilting part took me several months through the winter. I did a lot of the quilting while I was recuperating from my foot surgery last winter. I had a non weight bearing cast on my right foot, so it is a good thing that I use my left foot to control the foot pedal.

BERNINA has designed their sewing machine to be sewn with your left foot,  did you know that? So that you can use your right knee to engage the knee pedal. When I learned this little fact I immediately switched my foot over. I had absolutely no issue using my left foot to control the speed of my machine. I quilted on the quilt several hours a day while listening to books on tape.

I really didn’t think that I would get this finished in time to enter it this year. But hurrah for me I did.

This quilt measures 60″ x 60″ and is a very manageable project to do on my domestic home sewing machine. I use the 770 QE BERNINA and love it. It works like a charm. I did the free motion quilting with my number #24 foot. Here is a link to a blog I did about marking some of the patterns. I did all of the straight stitching in the border with my #96 foot and the even feed attachment engaged with that foot.

I will talk a little more about what threads I used on this quilt next time.