A BIG Finish!!

It's been almost two years of off and on hand quilting, but it's finally finished!!

I'm currently stitching the binding!  

The quilt is headed with me to a weekend retreat and soon it will be ready for a bed . . . . somewhere.

I pieced the blocks along with a group of other English paper piecing addicts following the direction of Karen at Faeries & Fibres during 2015 -- you can visit her blog HERE and scroll down the page to link to all of the posts relevant to this follow along.

And now here are close-ups of all the full blocks -- basically, I'm going to let them speak for themselves with just a few remarks.

 If you focus in on the drab brown pairs of hexagons in the motif below, you can see the quilting motif I used quite a bit to "connect" three hexagons together.

I've fiddled around unsuccessfully with the photos to get better views of the quilting I did since it's not the traditional "outline the hexagon" without much success.  Sorry.

I did rather simple fussy cutting on this quilt -- basically centering motifs here and there.

 

All the fabric I used already lived in my stash and is a combination of several eras of reproduction prints that I accumulated during the final years of owning a quilt shop.

The block configurations were inspired by an antique quilt sold by Christie's auction house at some point.  I saved it in my "enormous" hexagon board on Pinterest -- HERE is a link.

I haven't looked at that board for quite a while and boy, do I have a lot of great ideas saved there!?! 

 I used Quilter's Dream Wool batting -- it's easy to needle and gives a bit of puff.

I recall some of the fabric choices taking quite a bit of time but once that was done, the stitching was easy. 

I used a big stitch quilting approach and worked with size 16 pearle cotton.  

That thread size was an accident -- I had picked up a spools of cream, pink, and soft green somewhere and the colors were perfect!

Trouble was I needed more than I had and could not figure out my original source.

Thank goodness for some nice quilter on Instagram who steered me to the Colonial Needle Company who stock a wide assortment of pearle cotton in size 16!! 

 Some of the motifs felt off balance and that made it challenging for me to chose fabrics.

As you can see, each motif is outlined with a row of background hexagons and then set with a path. When I realized I didn't have enough of the soft floral I chose for the path, I added "intersection" greens and tan.

The border fabric is a gorgeous piece I hoarded just before closing my shop for the backing of some quilt, probably started but still not finished.  

It surfaced during one of my stash hunts and is just perfect!!

I haven't tried the quilt out on my own bed yet, but when traveling in Michigan during the fall of 2017, I had it along to use in a trunk show and was quilting on it during the evenings.

I stayed in a charming bed and breakfast and there was this perfect bed!!

The room was even painted the perfect color!

It would have been a shame for this quilt to be left in the UFO stacks and risk the chance of it being sold for "nothing" at the Big Yard Sale.  

Now I'm pretty sure one of my children will be happy to have it when I'm done with it!

Finishing the quilting was my February One Monthly Goal and so having it completely finished is a bonus!!  Check out all the other finishes HERE.

Update -- February, 2020

I entered this quilt in our local regional show and it earned an Honorable Mention ribbon.  I haven't seen the judging sheet yet so don't know what the judges thought of it beyond that.  I was disappointed to find the quilt which is hand pieced and hand quilted had been lumped into a category with machine pieced and machine quilted pieces.  Apparently there weren't enough quilts entered to warrant a class for all hand work pieces.  I need to think this over before entering quilts in that show in the future.

Mary