Wedding Quilt

Good friends of mine got married a year and a half ago. It's only this summer that I've had the time to finally quilt and bind the quilt that is my wedding gift to them.

I used Elizabeth Fransson's Crazy 9 Patch Quilt Pattern and wanted to highlight this owl fabric from Alexander Henry's 2010 Haunted House Collection:

Considering they're both academics, I think the owls are apropos. 

Now, the couple this was intended for has excellent taste, but prefer a much more neutral color palette than I would have picked for them. Of course, they live (for the time being) in Berlin and Bejing, so going to the local fabric store and picking out fabric was impossible. In order to get colors in a palette they liked I decided to go with a pre-set color pack from fabricworm.

Elizabeth Fransson's patterns are outstanding. They are clearly written, well-illustrated with step-by-step photos, and modern and beautiful. Easy enough for a beginner/advanced beginner, but also interesting enough for a more advanced quilter who wanted to whip out something beautiful very quickly. I really need to buy her book. I screwed up on my cutting, and everything still turned out just fine. The quilt is backed with a grey cotton. I used beige thread on the front, blue variegated thread on the back, and stippling (machine quilting) to hold it all together.

Te amo - I love you in one of the many languages this couple can communicate in.

The pictures came out blurry b/c my hand was shaky. I should have used the real camera and not my iphone, but oh well.  I loved making this quilt and would definitely use the pattern again in the future. I was scared to quilt words into the quilt, but I like the finished effect. I actually intended to include "Te amo, te quiero, para siempre" (I love you, I love/want you, for always), but chickened out and just went with a simple "te amo".

I really enjoy quilting and wish I had the money to do it more often. I have dreams of making a queen-sized quilt for our bedroom. I also wish I had a slightly better sewing machine. I've got a ghettolicious hand-me-down $80 walmart special sewing machine. Truth be told, for most of the sewing I do (straight lines) it's fine. No bells or whistles, everything is manual, but it's still a lot of fun. It actually does a pretty good w/ the free motion quilting, especially on single pieces of fabric. It's alright going over a seam that joins two pieces fo fabric, but get to something thicker like a corner where 3 or more pieces join, and it's a little to thick for the machine to handle. I also have a good number of tension issues that I know to watch out for and so can deal with, but it means stopping and checking (and ripping) frequently. It'd be really nice to have a machine that I didn't need to adjust quite as often as I do this one. Well, maybe I'll keep my eyes open on craigslist....

It really is too bad my SIL's quilt store isn't in an easy commute. I think I'd be pretty happy with an academic "plan B" of helping her run the store, maybe specializing in yarn, and taking adjunct gigs when I was able to.