Across the Sea Quiltalong Finish!!

Today is the big Ta-Dah day for our Across the Sea quiltalong. It seems like a long time since myself and my lovely friend Jennifer announced our Quiltalong back in August. I'll never forget the morning we posted it, waking up so nervous wondering if anyone would join us!  We quickly had some great peeps on board and it has just grown and grown since then, with over 100 people in the Flickr group - 100 people!!!!! It has been inspiring and amazing watching you all interpret the design, give it different looks with your fabric and layout choices and make it truly your own.

Today, I am really proud to be showing you my own finished version. Apologies for the quality of the pictures - they were taken in a misty drizzle this morning which is the best weather I have had in the 8 days since I finished it up. (I'm so jealous of peeps across the small pond in the UK who have had a glorious week of weather. Yes, I mean you Hadley and you Susan and you Nicky - I am completely jealous of your beautiful pics!!!) Despite the moaning I'm still going to bore you with lots of photos, just because I love it so much :-)

This quilt is for my beautiful new niece R who is just a few weeks old. I used a FQ bundle of Momo's Just Wing It for Moda, and mixed a few other fabrics in there for a little colour balance including the owl print from Its a Hoot, and a yellow print from Dream a Little Dream with Me by Keri Beyer for In The Beginning. I really love how the colours worked. It is girlie without being too pink and the aqua and green and touches of brown give it a nice depth of colour. I love Jennifer's cross block design and think she was inspired to include the scrappy border, it really ties it all together for me! I went superscrappy on my border because I just love that look, but I do wonder if it would have been even nicer with the longer border strips.

The back was my design and I really appreciate all the people who kept faith and made it - I know how strong the temptation is to not bother with a pieced back when you have the quilt front done, so thank you! I hope you feel it was worth the extra trouble - personally, I am very happy with it. I really love the bordered cross block, and I love how the other crosses just float there - particularly that cute little baby cross. Here's my finished back:

I used a white fabric with a baby pink polka dot for my backing - its hard to see here (thank you, crappy light conditions) but it really does add to the quilt and looks very nice.

When it came to the quilting, I went with an all over meandering stipple, a little larger than I normally stipple. I will definitely be using this sort of scale in the future, it was much quicker and looks just as nice - I was definitely over-quilting before!

You saw my binding last week - I'm still in love with it. I used to have some of this fabric in a blue/green colourway and I'm heading back into my local fabric shop this week to see if I can find it, its absolutely perfect for binding.

So there you go, I can't believe its all over! I'll be so sad that our little quiltalong crew is disbanding, but I know that I've made lots of new friends and discovered lots of great blogs in the course of this process.

I want to say a huge thank you to Jennifer, my partner in crime! She's just the best and we had lots of fun doing this, despite the challenges of being in two completely different time zones.
So, a really big reminder that you need to have your finished quilts posted in the Flickr group by tonight to be eligible for the giveaway this week. Winners will be announced on Wednesday. Also, instead of doing a linky of finished quilts which might be hard to manage between two blogs, I have set up a thread in the Flickr group for linking up your quilt finish posts - I hope you all go round and visit the blog links and spread the quilt love. That thread is here.

So, last but not least, here are my quilt stats in summary:


Quilt Stats:

Name: Across the Sea quilt
Made For: My niece R
Fabric: Just Wing It by Momo for Moda + some additional fabrics
Batting: Warm and White
Size: 46" x 58"
Quilting: Meandering stipple by me
Pattern: Mine and Jennifers quiltalong pattern.

Ok, and after all that I'll be doing a bit of linking myself! Linking up to Sew Modern Monday, Manic Monday and Fabric Tuesday with this one :-)