Quilt Reveal - Oh Honey Quilt - Southern Charm Quilts

This is my first large finish with anything to do with English paper piecing. And I’m feeling a sense of accomplishment, nevermind that it’s only partially EPP. It’s still a giant finish for me and one I’m pleased to have completed.

I designed this quilt last Fall in Illustrator and as always, pined away on other projects before I could get to it. I’ve got more ideas that I have time to finish, as we all do. It all started with a vintage quilt (as so many of my patterns do) and I saw that diamond or petal shape and just kept playing with it.

If you’ve missed prior posts about this quilt, you can find one here.

The Oh Honey quilt pattern releases this Friday. Do sign up for my newsletter if you haven’t already to know when the pattern goes live.

Get the Oh Honey quilt pattern!

The whole quilt took me around 6-7 weeks to complete, with 5 weeks spent just on the EPP portion of it. I’m slow though and only spent 1-3 hours on it a day. I did work on it every day though.

Four days were spent just on quilting it up. I decided that it deserved some effort on the quilting, but I just couldn’t decide if it was okay to quilt on top of EPP. I looked around on Pinterest, but couldn’t find EPP quilts where they were heavily machine quilted, so I turned to Tracy and asked her. I’m so glad I did! Tracy came up with the quilting pattern that’s on the center flower in the very middle. There are swirls in all the connecting hexagons and each petal has a large feather in it. It’s hard to see the feathers, but they are there.

I decided to try out some new shapes in the center background (inside the mint border). There’s leaves, swirls, rainbows, and rosy blooms. The mint border I quilted a lot less densely and that’s the reason it puffs just a bit. I love the effect of the border next to the more densely quilted sections. I’ll need to remember that for quilts in the future.

The outside border is quilted densely with swirls and the hexie flowers in the corners are quilted with petals.

My free motion quilting is still a bit clunky, but there’s definitely some growth, I think. I’ll just keep plugging away at it until I’m more confident.

The texture after washing it is AMAZING! I can’t stop petting the thing, especially the more denser sections.

There’s a few things I’ve learned with this quilt about FMQ that I think is going to really help me with future quilts.

I can’t tell you how many times I second guessed myself on the backing. I just kept thinking it needed to be gold, but in the end that red floral kept calling my name. It’s from Bonnie & Camille and all their wide backs are (well all Moda’s wide backs) are made with cotton satteen, so they are a bit slinky and crazy soft. Anyway, it gives the whole quilt this even better drape.

The backing is a bit old fashioned, I think, but then so are hexagon flowers, so I say it suits it.

Quilt Details:

Pattern – Oh Honey

Size – 80×80″

Top Fabrics – Middle: Knotted Trellis Gold, Meadow Trinkets, Delight Cotton Candy, Cotton Couture Solid in Nickel, Apricot Florals, Asterisk Apricot, Strawberry X Plaid, and Shabby in Vivid. Borders: Pindot Seaglass. Background: Neon Pink Speckled, Eloise, Cotton Couture Bright White, Cotton Couture Soft White, and Always and Always in thyme.

Backing Fabrics – Blooms in Cream

Binding – Stripe in Persimmon

Batting – Warm & Natural

Thread – So Fine by Superior in Blizzard for piecing, Microquilter in Natural White for quilting.

Techniques Used – English paper piecing, free motion quilting, and chunky stitch binding

Quilt Label – from my shop here, tutorial for how to install it here

Skill Level – Beginner English Paper Piecing

Availability – For sale here

While working on Oh Honey I’ve put together a bunch of tutorials to help get you started if you want to learn or make this quilt yourself.

The Oh Honey quilt pattern will release this coming Friday. You can purchase it here when it does. I’ve already got a video about the fabric chart here if you missed that yesterday.

Thanks for reading along!