Blogger's Quilt Festival: The Blue Groove
Welcome all from the BQF! If you're a follower of my blog, then you've been seeing this quilt a lot recently, as I just finished it in the past few days. Here are a few fun facts:
Completed as part of the Totally Groovy Quilt Along
Finished dimensions: 66" x 78" (a smaller twin size)
Quilted on my charming old Bernina (my grandmother's from the 1970s!)
Possible categories: favorite bed quilt, favorite home machine quilted quilt
I decided to sew this quilt once I saw its ridiculous amount of curves - I had a bad experience in the past with curves, so I avoided all patterns with them - but I was starting to find this limiting! I thought I should learn so I would stop shying away from curvy patterns. It was really great practice!
I now feel confident in sewing curves (yay for learning new things!) and I'm worried I may have gotten myself addicted to this fun trick.
I also had a great time quilting this guy. It's the largest quilt I've ever machine quilted, and so also the largest work of free motion quilting I've ever done. I estimate that the quilting took me around 20 hours.
It wasn't the easiest to quilt on that small harp space, but I got used to it! Plus, it was kind of cool to sew a 70s style quilt on my 70s machine :). This is actually the king sized version, but scaled down - I preferred the composition of the king sized pattern, but don't have a bed that big and didn't feel like tackling that large of a quilt right now (trying to finish up a bunch of projects before baby #2 is due!).
To get a great all over design with a high degree of complexity, I actually followed elements of the backing fabric. I looked for paths of connecting elements and quilted around those, which meant I also got to practice my backtracking skills. The backing fabric is this crazy floral with spirographs and fun patterns that looked very 70s to me; perfect for a "groovy" quilt! I used gray sulky thread for the quilt top and black for the backing, to match the black lines I was following.
I used fabrics from the "Sketch" line by Timeless Treasures in aqua, pool, denim, and charcoal. The white solid is Kona Snow, and the binding is one of the original Riley Blake chevron prints. I cut the binding so that it looks like a bias cut stripe on the front of the quilt, and a bit of the chevron is visible on the back side. The backing is a French Bull fabric.
Thank you so much for stopping by, I hope you are enjoying the link up! Since I like it when other quilters do this, here's links to my previous BQF quilts:
