It's been a while since I posted, and my quilt journal is sadly out of date. So here's a quick update of some of the work that happened this year.
This project was a quilt-a-long with Patchwork Times way back in 2014. The top has been finished for years, but I finally pulled it out as part of my UFO challenge this year, and got it quilted and bound.
Over the summer, I joined a workshop on Pojagi quilting. This as a lot of fun. One layer (so not officially a quilt, if you want to enter something in a show), but all finished edges. Essentially, every seam is a flat-felled seam, so the raw edges are all enclosed. It's not great for a really accurate quilt top, but something more free-form, where you can avoid a lot of bulk at seam intersections, it is really neat.
For the past few years, I have designed a quilt and offered it as a quilt-along/mystery quilt for a couple of my guilds. This year, I did a "block of the month" instead. Each month we made between 1-4 blocks of a particular design, and after 8 months, they were assembled into this quilt.
I quilted this with 2 layers of batting (Hobbs 80/20 on the bottom, wool on top). I wanted a "whole-cloth" look on the back, so I quilted with that in mind, rather than sticking to the blocks on the front. I love the way the back came out, and the texture on the front is fabulous. I would not do this quite the same way again, as the mistmatch between the quilting and blocks on the front was a bit distracting.
Here is a better view of the front.
And Elsie. I love Elsie. The pattern is Elephant Abstractions by Violet Craft. I made a smaller size - about 60% I think - by printing the foundation papers on 8 1/2x11" paper rather than 11x17". I pulled fabrics entirely from my stash for Elsie. I wanted something other than grey, but not too outlandish. I think the green/brown theme worked well. The background was interesting. I've had that fabric in my stash for 10 years. It was bought on sale, to be used as backing for something, because it is a lovely brushed cotton. But it is the ugliest colour, and in 10 years I have never found a quilt that worked with it for backing.
When I went digging for background for Elsie, I tried about 5 different fabrics and narrowed it down to this one and one other. My quilting group unanimously chose this - and they were absolutely right (I just had to let go of the fabric I loved, which did not work nearly as well when viewed objectively). I turned the brushed cotton backwards, so that it looks & feels like regular cotton, to match the rest of the quilt.
