My maddest project Christine's Folly

I bought my first embroidery machine and began to play.  I saw a magazine with some designs stitched and made into a quilt.  Liked the designs but not the quilt but does that stop me?
Simon's Folly magazine with designs by Jenny Haskins inspired me to stitch this quilt.  I began to stitch the quilt blocks  immediately.
Late last year in a clean up I found a pile of fabrics (a lot of fabrics - you know when you see a fabric that you think might look good but... so you buy more?)  Included in this stack of fabric were background fabrics cut into squares, wadding cut up all ready to go AND 1 embroidered block complete with decorative stitching and a partially stitched block.  Hey, that is the first embroidered quilt I started!  No wonder it didn't get very far - so many hoopings just for one block.  However, I now have that wonderful Bernina 830 with a JUMBO hoop.  So I started stitching again.  I was able to put my blocks together, even add decorative stitching in many of them and reduced the hoopings mostly to 4 or 5.  My machine ran hot. Because of the delay from start to finish with this quilt one of the larger blocks needed to have a seam in the background fabric as the overall quilt design kept changing.  You really need to look to find it so that heavy quilting has paid off.  It was wonderful to stitch the quilting at the end using that BSR, all free motion quilted using non-mark quilting.  I used cotton/poly wadding.  I piped all of the blocks with a pistachio coloured fabric, outline stitched the width of my 10D foot from the framing fabrics edges and then added a decorative stitch in the middle of the frames.  I also added a piping to the binding.
It is also a quilt that measures 106" square - huge but I was very happy to see the rest of that pile of fabric finally added back into my stash.

Block 1 with some of the border quilting shown

Fill in alternate blocks

Another corner block

Block 3

Block 4

Block 5

Detail of corner quilting of the center medallion block

Centre Medallion

Yet another

And another

Christine's Folly 

In the quilting thread alone there is nearly 7,500 metres of thread - hate to think how much embroidery thread.
I know now why it was called Simon's Folly!


Chrisb

Baltimore Album

I have stitched quite a few Baltimore album style quilts, from full size to wall hangings. Beginning with hand needle turn, most of the album quilts that I currently stitch are mock hand applique needle turned. The quilt shown on my home page is the first Baltimore Album quilt I digitised and stitched using my embroidery machine.  It is also the first quilt design that I digitised.
Stitched on my Bernina 440, the blocks required either 2 or 3 hoopings whilst the centre block was multiple hoopings using the mega hoop.  These days I would use my Bernina 830 - other than the centre block they would all be one hooping in the jumbo hoop. The basic blocks finish at 12" square.