Wednesday, January 18, 2012

The Whirly-Gig Quilt

This quilt is from March of last year... I made it for a friend's baby shower, using my standard surprise-color-selection method of peeking at her shower registry and trying to match the bedding colors.  The pattern itself I did by educated guess and it turned out just fine.  I had to cut all the pieces out and arranged them on my table and then carefully sew/layout/sew/layout the whole thing because of the way the squares contribute to the overall design.  That is such a pain, right??  So, ok, maybe you always have to do that, but usually you are laying out 10-12" squares, and these were only 6".  I didn't have a design wall back then and it was fairly miserable as a result.  Maybe if you buy a pattern there is some magical way where you stack them up all the right way and then cut here and sew there and then unfold the finished top like a string of paper dolls. 

 
I did varied-width "downhill straight line quilting" on this quilt.  That's where you mess up your machine settings and the quilt top gets dragged down relative to the back and the whole top ends up slightly cockeyed.   It's one of my favs!  (Going by how many quilts I use it on...)

Also, I bought almost exactly double the amount of fabric that I actually needed, as usual.  Is it so terrifying to think of being a few inches short of fabric that I actually need to double my estimates?  I should start trying to think of it as a delicious challenge to make it work if I'm short on fabric.  Live on the razor edge.  Life would be more exciting, no?

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