Cherry Valley Designs: Finish It Up Friday

Friday, January 11, 2013

Finish It Up Friday

Hi Everyone! This is my first time participating in a Linky Party, I'm pretty darned excited!

Please join me and others at these sites I'm participating in today and a special shout of thanks to each of these great sites for hosting:

Crazy Mom Quilts

Can I Get a Whoop Whoop?

Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday

I'm also pretty happy about the project I finished up ... it's only been on my to do list the past several months ... Eek! The quilt is "Welcome Friends" and is the free pattern you receive when you sign up for our newsletter on our shop's homepage. I finished the actual quilt top early in the fall, early enough that I was able to get these glorious shots before the weather turned icky ...

Unfortunately, this quilt isn't quilted or bound. Last week I quilted the top and last night we bound it. It is so nice to have it finally finished. It is one of our favorite quilts - both my mom and I designed it and it was so much fun to put together.

With this quilt I decided to branch out a bit and do a little more intense quilting than I've done on any of my other quilts. You may know that I've been renting time on a Gammill at my favorite quilt store and since this quilt is smaller (it's a wallhanging), I thought this would be the perfect quilt to practice on.

As you can see, I did a lot of paper practice before I actually went down. First I traced the blocks on tracing paper and then I traced this onto paper that I could practice my designs on. For the center block I did my first feathers and they turned out really nicely. Unfortunately, that can be said about all of my blocks. For some of my blocks I wanted to do geometric shapes with straight lines, but when I got on the machine the lines I was making were way too wavy. Does anyone have any advice for long arm quilting straight lines?

Anywho, I'm really pleased with how the overall quilt turned out and am looking forward to hanging it up for display. Here are the after photos ...

I really like the overall design on this, but it could use some tweaking!

I came up with this design on a whim, the corners are supposed to be like fans and the nine patches are supposed to be like flowers with heart petals.