Finally, a finished quilt

Darlings, I've finished it. I started this quilt in July 2012 when the Olympics were on. Three months later I'd pieced together the quilt top and had moved on to hand-quilting it...and then I got horribly stuck. When I'd started the hand-quilting I'd made my rows of stitching less than 1/4" apart and it gradually dawned on me that it would take me hundreds of hours to be able to finish it.

While I'd found the white borders around the central medallion fun to quilt, my enthusiasm wained when I began quilting the borders which frame the piecing and I felt overwhelmed by how much work it would require to finish it...so I left it carefully folded away in a bag under our bed for nearly around ten months. It was only when my daughter asked if I'd mind finishing it for her 12th birthday (having missed her last birthday with it) that I knew I had to start work on it again. I considered unpicking all my stitches and re-quilting it with lines of quilting spaced further apart so that it would be a quicker process. The fact that I didn't do this is in no small part thanks to the encouragement not to do so that I received here on my blog and over on Instagram (most especially, Helen, who was particularly forceful - I'm grateful for this as it would have felt like a compromise after I'd done it). Once I'd started hand-quilting it for the second time, I actually fell in love with the process all over again and it's been a totally enjoyable experience. With a birthday deadline to meet, I've stitched it nearly every evening and every weekend for the last month, staying up many nights until the early hours of the morning watching films on Netflix in order to get it finished. Such fun - I'm bereft now it's all over.

I find it an impossible task to photograph something as big as a quilt (and have much admiration for others who do it so well) and pictures that show what it looks like as a whole seem to lose the feel of the quilt as the moment I photograph it from a distance the beautiful Liberty prints are lost. My husband tried to help me to photograph it outside, but the colours got lost in the light, which is strange when it's gloomy today. Any tips for photographing whole quilts?

If you're interested in seeing any of the stages this quilt went through to make it you can find them here:

Starting the medallion

Finishing the medallion

Cutting the squares which make up the rest of the quilt

Deciding the squares were too big and so resizing them all (!)

The long process of sewing all the squares together

Beginning hand-quilting the quilt

In the midst of hand-quilting

But really, a finished quilt is not finished until it has been photographed with a cat on it.

I could just gobble up her tiny cuteness. This cat has the most alarming ability to make fabric, or maybe it's just my sewing, look an awful lot more lovely. I may start getting her to sit next to me when I'm modelling any dressmaking in the future.

The danger of taking so long to finish a quilt is that you can fall out of love with the fabrics. I feel grateful that my daughter still adores these Liberty prints, because there's another quilt beneath my bed that's still waiting to be finished and I'm sad to say that I don't love the fabrics in the same way that I did when I first started the project. Maybe if I leave it there for twenty years I'll come full circle?

I'm now looking forward to wrapping this up, ready for my daughter's birthday. Although I've just realised I still have to make a quilt patch for it.

I have several things stacked up to be worked on next: one is to start my next paper piecing wall hanging, which some of you recently helped me choose the colours for; another is a jacket made from the delicious boiled wool from Dragonfly fabrics which featured in my last post; and then there's the reality knit from Miss Matatabi, which I'm still trying to decide whether to make into a blanket or a dress.

Thank you for all your encouragement with this quilt. I'm ashamed to say that, without it, I may have taken the easier route and machine quilted it.

Florence x