I have procrastinated too long about showing some of the quilts and embroideries I have stitched over the last 30 years. I am now rectifying this and hope to add to my journal as quilts and creations are gradually completed. I have so many unfinished projects many of these used for teaching purposes. I have decided that after the last few years during which I have been unable to stitch as much as previously it is time to try and finish as many as possible.
I hope that you enjoy looking at some of my creations as I work through this pile! It may take some time.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

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

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