Knitting the Blues: Blogger's Quilt Festival

I have spent many hours of my sewing and knitting time cruising the internet looking at quilts and wishing I could join in on the Blogger's Quilt Festival. Here it is, the final day and the quilts that have been promised to be returned to me all quilted up by today are still not here. I was so hoping that I could get some photos of the quilts that I have earlier blogged about after the quilting, even if I still needed to bind them up. Not to be, but I will post the sneak peak photos of quilts that I have shown before.

It has been a little while since I have quilted. I sew all of the time, I make custom window treatments (among other things) by day and make a lot of my own clothes and decorations in my free time, but it had been a while since a quilt had left my machine. (It was this one for my oldest daughter and the story of that one resembles the story of the following quilt, also for her).

This is a sneak peak of the back, one I didn't include in my last post, when I posted about the quilt top.

I have also made some little surprises with the scraps, but in order to keep a little bit of the surprise I'll be saving those for later.

The other quilt I am waiting for is the baby quilt I worked on over the summer. I tried some new things in this one, raw edge machine applique, foundation piecing the hearts, and the borders ended up being a lesson for me. When I first quilted I took a class, we strip pieced and tied the quilts, so special attention was not give to the borders. We just sewed the border strip on and cut it at the end. Firs the the sides, then the top and bottom. That was years ago and when I added the borders to this quilt it was clear they weren't going to work, they flared horribly. (It amazes me still that I approached this entire process entirely differently than I do window treatments or knitting. It was like I was of another mind. I mean the window treatment thing? We work for nationally known designers, the work has been in national decorating magazines, and I quilted like a beginner!) After giving it a little thought I took the borders off, measured the quilt, re-cut the borders, added the hearts back on and attached them to the quilt again. So.Much.Better.