TGIFF! - Bright Stripes

Bright Stripes - Close up

Welcome to Thank Goodness It's Finally Finished (TGIFF), where every finish deserves a celebration!

Pull up a chair, grab a cup of something delicious, and let's see what quilty goodness has been finished this week.

Bright Stripes

Happy Dance! Happy Dance!

Bright Stripes is done and I simply adore it! I'm so glad I put on my big girl pants to cut into my little stash of Bright Remix by Robert Kaufman for this project.

For those who are here for the first time, this is my test of my Falling for Stripes pattern (coming soon).

Bright Stripes - Front

Quilting Detail - Double line
separating the spirals
from the straight lines

This is quilted with white 50 wt. Aurifil thread (#2024) with spirals, a small double line around the outer spirals and then straight lines.

Quilting Detail

The spirals were started with free motion quilting, but then I switched to my walking foot so that I'd get more even and uniformly-spaced spirals. I'd seen this on someone else's blog, but now I can't remember who it was. Sorry! One lesson learned was to do at least 10 turns of the spiral to make the centre free motion spiral large enough so that the walking foot can maintain a smoother curve.

I love effect the effect of the spirals done this way, but it took twice as long to do it as I had planned and there are a ton of threads to bury at the end. There was a lot of knee lifting, turning, and pulling the quilt through the throat of the machine for this quilt. It's hard on the shoulders and wrists. It's worth it though.

For the back, I took one strip of scrap Bright Remix and some white. Simple. I like it.

Bright Stripes - Back

I also used the Bright Remix for the binding, just like I did with What The FMQAYGQAL? I love, love, love Bright Remix as a binding.

Quiltography: "Bright Stripes," by Michèle-Renée Charbonneau, Ottawa, 45" by 57", 2013.

Oh, and if you haven't had a chance to enter my Sew Sisters Birthday Giveaway, it closes Monday...
This was one of my Q3 goals for the 2013 Finish-along with Leanne at She Can Quilt. Yay! 

Wedding Quilt - A Work in Progress

First, a great big thank you for considering my request for testers. I know it's an odd time of year to test, but I'm thrilled to say that I have three wonderful volunteers and we are ready to go! Here is a photo that I was really hoping to share with you in my last post, but couldn't find it for some reason. I adore the Bright Remix fabric set up in the hourglass block. 

I thought I'd share with you the process for designing the other side of this wedding quilt:

I wanted the other side to use the same red, but pair it with grey.

First layout. Large 10.5" equilateral triangles. Five rows of triangles, seven full triangles in each row. Very graphic, but not symmetrical. Hmm...

 Maybe add more red shades of red? Liking that light red star...

More light grey? No.

 Different order? No.

More random? Hmm...

Order and random?

 Make the star completely light grey and use the dark grey for the random bits? Better, but not quite.

 Remove the dark grey? Yes, I think so.

And this is where we are, putting on the borders. I realized that I was putting one border on backwards  last night and it was late so I called it a night. Here's where it stands -- unpicking the border today and resewing.

It's been a while since I linked up to WIP Wednesday at The Needle and Thread Network, but it's the Needle and Thread Network's 100th WIP Wednesday so I couldn't resist. Thanks Monika for hosting such a great linky!

What are you working on this week?