Joan at Leschenault

My First quilt - King sized!

I began this quilt in the 1980's .. I went to a sampler class when I lived in Perth, and instead of making just one block ...I did 2 of the same in different colours.

The lace in the Grandmothers Fan blocks belonged to my Grandmother..and the pink and the pale teal fabric is from the sheets we had when we first married - nearly 50 years ago.

I cut the sashing..and forgot to wash to wash the fabric first...it runs ... very badly....so I put the blocks away in a chest for another 10 years...and when I moved to the country in the hills above Perth, I made a very special friend of Liz, and I have mentioned in an erlier post that without her, I would not have been on this journey...

Anyhow, I managed to sew it together with her help and encouragement, and marked - very heavily in pencil! -all the designs,  after first drawing and cutting my own stencisll....I burnt them with a hot knife...difficult.

This is all hand quilted - I really thought that was how I had to do all the quilting.  

Well... I finished the hand quilting last year! and the binding is still not on...but we sleep very warmly under it :)

The back of the quilt.

Very heavily quilted as it was a wool batting.

As this quilt had taken sooo long...I decided there must be quicker ways to do this.  Hence I have been learning to do machine quilting.,

I have made a few quilts now, but never FMQ ...and I now prefer to sandwich the quilts and put the designs on afterwards...also time consuming.  

I tried various methods one of which I used in the quilt below. 

Called 'From My Heart to Yours', this is a quilt I made for Andrea in 2003.  All machine quilted...and also not marked before it was put together.  I machined the designs onto  a heap of tear away fabirc with the sewing machine - needle and no thread, then threaded with the cotton I sewed each design with a separate 'block' of the tearawy fabric. ...and long strips of the tear-away for the borders. That was easier than the pencil

A different view of the quilting on Andfrea's quilt.

More later...I am trying to get a video up af me quilting the border fo my Prism Quilt....but not having much luck getting it from the camera to the computer.

Oh - I had more bad luck last night.  Silly me wasnt watching the edges of the quilt when I was quilting, and of course - I sewed some of the edge bits onto the patterned area...so unpicking is in progress...not easy!

But a lesson hard learnt!

More of my story later