Quilt Reveal - My Eowyn Quilt is Finished + thoughts on hand quilting

I’m pretty smitten about this quilt. When I discussed it in my previous post, I was talking about trying hand quilting.

I decided to machine quilt first and then add the hand quilting. This might have been a little backwards to the correct way of doing this, BUT it really was what and how I wanted to do it.

I was planning on dragging this quilt about on a camping trip we went on and I wasn’t positive about how long my spray basting would hold up. Machine quilting would sturdy everything up for me and then I could sit and drag all I wanted.

The above picture is me with the quilt on my lap. I’m watching this video my Carolyn Friedlander to learn. This class was from Creative Bug and I pay $4.95 a month to watch these classes.

I really like Creative Bug. If you haven’t tried it, I would highly recommend it. $4.95 is such a low price that I don’t feel it. There are MANY, many classes to take and you can take them as often as you need. I have watched Carolyn teach this class 3 times.

She teaches lots of different quilting techniques in it: hand quilting, walking foot quilting, free motion quilting and even hand tying (which I REALLY want to try soon). She mixes all of these up on one single quilt. She has lots of great tips that were helpful for me.

Plus, she has this lackadaisical way of stitching that I like. It doesn’t matter if your stiches are big, wonky, or imperfect (which is exactly what my stitches are), the fact that it shows your hand, makes it more beautiful.

I really like that.

I did manage to figure out Xs on my own. I couldn’t find a single video online that taught this and I looked everywhere. So I winged it and I LOVE it.

As you can see, I just added patches of hand quilting here and there at random. I think there are 5 or 6 patches and the whole thing took me about an hour and that included learning that X. So it turns out that very little skill is required for hand quilting. I actually think more skill is required of machine quilting than hand quilting, but there is something really beautiful about that hand touch.

You might be wondering why I mixed the two. Machine quilting makes a quilt very strong. It strengthens up your seams and your quilt will last much longer with it. I’m not sure that I would ever completely leave it out of a quilt. I’ve been around many antique quilts and I always think that if they had machine stitches they would have lasted longer. And I want my quilts to last. I want my great grandchildren up under one of my quilts one day, or dragging it around and being loved to death.

I realize that many of you might think I ruined this quilt by adding the words. I can see that, but this was the original idea and I needed it out of my head and to move on.

I saved up these low volumes for over a month for this quilt. Every time I ran into a piece that had a particular hue that I wanted for this quilt, I had a stack it went into saved for this quilt.

Many of the fabrics were chosen because they were feminine. The Bari J horse fabric was chosen because of the fact that Eowyn was from tribe of people that had great skill when it came to horses. Most of the fabrics were chosen just because of the coloring.

For the backing, I went with scrappy. My MO for the last few months.

I really want to do a post on making quilt backings and I think I’ve said that before, but I’ll get there, I promise.

I know many people like to put one single fabric on a quilt back. But you piece quilt backs most of the time and I don’t like piecing the same fabric with the same fabric because it creates this divide that bugs me every time I look at it (yeah, I can be particular). The divide being where the two pieces of the same fabric don’t match up exactly right and you can see it.

So that is why I like multi fabric backing.

And my backings, don’t take me that long. That’s another thing I don’t like is spending too much time on a quilt back. I want minimal time, but I also want to like it.

I binded with my new favorite fabric. It’s a black and white stripe from Riley Blake. Oh, I am in love with this one.

I know that stripes are a favorite among quilters, particularly black and white stripes, but I find it hard to use. I always get scared about pairing it with quilts that don’t have any black in them. I don’t know why, because I see it done all the time and it’s lovely, but it doesn’t stop my fear on my quilts.

However, for this quilt it just felt right.