After starting, piecing and basting it in January, I finally finished this quilt last Saturday and relished the hand-binding time... And then it took me forever to find two people willing for even the briefest moment to hold it for pictures. I had to take them very quickly!!
I don't often do patterns anymore but I really liked this one when it first came out. It languished for a year or so, untouched. And then there was a Groove-along last summer but budget and time kept me from joining up. Plus, I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it.
I ended up coming across a picture of rocks - a whitish-grey with rusty orange stripes through it - and the gears started turning. The pattern looked like sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, layered and folded over time. (At least to my mind anyway - I'm far from a geologist.) I picked a bunch of neutrals and added my favourite - orange - to be kinda oxide-ish.
Wanting the quilting to be different for each colour, I scribbled a bunch of free-motion designs that had an abstract stone feel to them. The grey has a pebbly, gravel texture to it. The orange is more crystal-like and reminds me of quartz or potash. The white is layered loops. The brown I tried to make a little like shale - layered and broken. And the natural I tried to make look like my inspiration - a solid coloured rock with bands of wavy colour running through it. I matched the thread to the fabrics but not to the sections. Variegated brown on the orange, natural on the white, etc.
The back is composed of all the scraps and leftovers, plus a yard of teal to cover the shortfall.
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| Sorry for the dips along the top - cranky quilt holders! :-) |
I didn't get a close-up but I did a semi-crazy thing and matched the binding to the top all the way around.
Sometimes, the binding on a quilt looks like a mini-border and breaks the visual of it. Since I already knew how wide the sections were because of the pattern, I had the binding pieced before I even finished the quilt top. The corners were tricky - as was accounting for quilting shrinkage - but I'm really please with how it turned out.
Haven't had a second to sew since. Maybe on Monday. Oh, and I have a surprise on Monday! :-) See you then!
