meet me by the old oak at noon

28 May

…and we will have a little picnic.

I fell in love with the dessert fabric (“Kids at Play II” for Hancock Fabrics) the moment I saw it, but I had a difficult time choosing the right project for it.

I used a quilt as go technique to make it.  I hadn’t heard of quilt as you go until a couple of months ago, when I stumbled upon Penny’s blog Sewtakeahike, (Although I think I found a link to her on tumblr, so technically I tumbled upon her site.)  She was hosting a quilt as you go quilt along where she made the coolest quilt.  A couple of weeks after that, I caught and episode of Fons & Porter where they doing a slightly different quilt as you go method.  I cheated and mish mashed all the information together to make my verison.

First I pieced the blocks and then sandwiched each block with batting and a slightly larger square of backing fabric.

I quilted each square with lines at random angles using a variegated thread with shades of blue, yellow, and ivory.

After quilting, I trimmed and squared the blocks (and put them in a pretty stack)

Then I stitched the blocks into rows and the rows into a quilt, stitching the wrong sides together so the exposed seams are on the front.  This way you can cover them and all the extra stitching to attach them will be on the back.

I did a lot of back and forth over whether I should cover the seams with ribbon or fabric, but finally decided that matching the fabric to the binding was going to look the best.

Here’s a shot of the back. (Make Life… by Sweetwater for Moda)

This is only my second quilt, but I have to say, I’m really liking this quilting thing.  I can also already see the downside.  So many amazing fabrics, so many cool ways to make quilts – if you aren’t paying attention, you could turn around one day and buried under a tower of quilts.  For that reason, I’m thinking about putting this one up for sale in my etsy shop.  As of now, I’m undecided.

I’m also excited because I was able to finish it in time for The Bloggers’ Quilt Festival over at Amy’s Creative Side.  What an amazing group of quilts and quilters – you should check it out.

ps.  I know the quilt is covered in strings, but I’m desperate to make several deadlines today so strings happened.

A gratuitous peony shot just because they are so lovely-

Tags: , , ,

8 Responses to “meet me by the old oak at noon”

  1. Dolly May 28, 2010 at 3:23 pm #

    Nice job…….I might want to try this method on a small scale to see if I like it. Thanks for the reminder.

  2. calegar May 28, 2010 at 4:33 pm #

    Wow! This look so much more difficult than what you showed! Thanks for the little tutorial! I will have to try!

  3. Sarah May 28, 2010 at 11:25 pm #

    Very cute fabric. I’m glad you posted about the Quilt as you go method. I have a stack of finished quilt blocks from my virtual quilting bee and I am leaning towards trying to quilt them that way.

  4. Zonnah May 29, 2010 at 1:08 pm #

    I love it!

  5. Leslie May 29, 2010 at 8:55 pm #

    this is really cool. i love the modern feel of it. and the way you made it and quilted it is so interesting to me.

  6. Erin May 29, 2010 at 10:15 pm #

    yummy quilt! & thanx for the step-by-step :) http://erinlebeau.blogspot.com/

  7. Carol Hansen May 31, 2010 at 5:50 am #

    Thanks you for the tutorial. I’ve got a number of orphan blocks that I think I will try the quilt as you go method out on :)

  8. Janet June 2, 2010 at 2:31 pm #

    I’ve seen this method on a few quilts now, it would be so much easier than maneuvering a queen size quilt around on my machine, I really need to try this. You did a great job!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 90 other followers