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 :-)

         

Piecing your Borders: Across the Sea QAL

Have you decided on your block layout? There are great options turning up in the Flickr group and I love seeing the different interpretations everyone has of their blocks.

Today is all about putting together your borders, so head over to Ellison Lane Quilts where Jennifer is all ready to show you how. As you can see, I went for the super scrappy look in my border! I'm totally in love with this baby girl quilt - hope you like it too!

Layout Tips: Across The Sea QAL

I hope that by now you're well on the way to getting all your cross blocks pieced. You might have played around with your fabrics and colours before cutting, but now is the time to really have fun deciding on a layout for your blocks.

This is one of the parts of quilting that I love and enjoy. Different layouts can give a quilt a totally different look and can be the deciding factor in giving your quilt a "wow" quality. Everyone has their own way of doing it and you need to find what works for you. However, I'm going to share some of the things I like to do in the hope that it might help, particularly if this is your first quilt. I've had to think quite a bit about some of this post as mostly I'm pretty intuitive about how I do this - so it was kind of surprising when I broke down what I was doing to realise there is actually some order to it!! I'll show you some different versions of my layout to illustrate the points. I need to apologise that my pictures are a little dark in this but indoor photography is always difficult.

1. Find a space to lay out your quilt blocks. (If you have a design wall then I am totally jealous of you!!) For new quilters, a design wall is a great idea if you have a blank wall somewhere with reasonably good light you can use. Jennifer has more information on design walls in her post today, so check it out if you want to find out more. Me, I live in a small house and have no wall that is suitably blank at the moment, so I use either the playroom floor or my bed to layout my quilts. If you're using the floor, make sure it is clean! Bending up and down moving around blocks can be hard on the back, so I tend to use the floor for small quilts, and the bed for bigger ones. This is one reason which design walls are a great idea ;-)

2. For this quilt, I wanted a random colour/pattern arrangement rather than a graduation of colour, or a particular theme. I do a lot of my quilts like this. (Obviously if you are going for a particular look you will have to work within that, but some of these pointers may still be helpful.) I usually lay down my blocks pretty randomly the first time, basically trying to separate out colours from each other. If you can manage to do this without little helpers moving your just placed blocks its always helpful :-))

3. Then I look at the prints and try to make sure that my print patterns are well balanced. I try to make sure I don't have duplicates of the same print in different colours too close together, or beside each other, as in the bottom right 2 blocks in this picture.

I also like to balance small vs. large prints. In the next picture, you can see that in the first and second rows, the left and middle blocks are all prints of a similar size, and likewise, further down, larger scale prints are too close together.


Finally I look at the density of colour and print, and how the blocks interact together. Some prints almost look like a solid colour, or have very strong colours and more lightly patterned fabrics may recede beside them. Have a look below - the middle blocks in the top 2 rows are both strong, dense colours causing the blocks to the right to recede a bit too much. Likewise, the bottom row has two strong coloured blocks side by side, causing a further imbalance.

4. I move and move and move my blocks until I am happy. I look at lots of different versions and I take a pic of every version of the layout I do with either my phone or the camera. Mostly, its intuitive for me, I just go with what feels right.

5. When I get to a layout I'm happy with, I leave it and shut the door and go do something else for a while. If I had a design wall, I would leave overnight and come back the next day to finish off. However, that's not possible so I usually have to finish a layout the night I start it.

6. After a little break from looking at it (always best if accompanied by a cup of tea and some chocolate!) I usually start flicking through the pictures I took. I find taking pictures to be the most important part of the layout process for me. It gives me so much perspective. I see things that I never see when looking at the layout myself. Colours jump out at me, areas which are receding too much, areas where the colour is too strong and imbalanced. I get an idea of what works and doesn't from looking at the pictures.

7. Then I go back and look at the layout I arrived at. Sometimes, I am happy with it. Sometimes I tweak it based on the pictures I've been looking at. Usually at this stage, I snap each change and look at it there and then and know instantly if it works. It's a little like a dance for me. I keep going till I'm happy. Then I take a good overall picture of my layout, and if its a detailed quilt (like my Kaleidoscope quilt) with a lot of prints and blocks, I take close up pictures of areas of the quilt - e.g. each quarter of it, so I have them to refer to for sewing. But you shouldn't need to do that here.


8. The last step is to organise and stack your blocks ready to sew together. This is REALLY important. Take your time and decide how you are going to do this. After making lots of mistakese with my first few quilts, I now have a system I use for every single quilt. I sew in rows rather than columns, so I start with the lefthand block on each row and I put it on top of the block to its right, and continue like that to the end of the row. I end up with a little column of block stacks.Then I ususally pin through the centre of each little pile to keep them separate, and I stack the piles, starting with the top one. At the end, all my blocks are stacked in piles of rows, from top to bottom. That way when I start to sew, I work from left to right on each row and I sew top row first, continuing to bottow row. I never vary from this, and I find being consistent on how I organise my blocks for assembling my quilt top has helped me a lot. Sometimes, particularly if you have fabric repeats, it is a good idea to put a little post-it with the row number on the top block of each little row stack. That way you can't get mixed up (or if your kids get at the sewing box, they can't ruin all your good work!)

The next step will be to sew your rows together and to add your borders. Jennifer will have more information on this next week! For now, here's where I'm up to: