I’m a little behind schedule here posting about the two quilts I finished last month. Since then I’ve been working on some smaller projects that had hard deadlines so I neglected to get this up sooner.
First is my Denyse Schmidt improv quilt. As I mentioned last October, I attended her lecture for the Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild and the follow-up workshop. I ended up with seven blocks of various sizes and had no idea what to do with them…..until I saw what Shea had done with hers at one of our meetings.
I used chocolate brown Kona instead of Shea’s charcoal gray and I think mine is bigger and more off-center.
The back is Moda Grunge, I’m not sure what color. The photo makes it look very orange but it’s much more red.
I quilted the blocks with a boxy maze-like pattern and my go-to waves on the borders.
Instead of binding the quilt I used the facing method I learned about from Valori Wells in one of her workshops at QuiltCon. I think it looks good on this type of quilt.
The second finish was a long time coming. I started the English Paper Piecing probably two years ago. Many hours of guilt-free TV watching ensued. I wanted to use up some of my 30s reproduction scraps but I’m sure I ended up buying more than I saved.
I looked all over the internet for a good way to finish this off, without much luck. Everything I found had you either appliqueing the flowers onto a really big background or cutting edges off. Neither of those seemed like the best options to me. So I cut the foundation paper and pieced those for the edges before applying the border.
I then decided to big stitch quilt the entire thing. I used a wool batting which made the stitching much smoother. I think I’ll have to keep this quilt after all that work.
