Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Unvalentine Quilt

Way back in February 2015, I had the good fortune to take Lee Heinrich’s Off the Grid class at QuiltCon. It was all about how to design quilts using alternate gridwork. I really enjoyed the class, and even finished a quilt top that day, but it was not my favorite quilt by a long shot. You see, we were told to bring a few already made blocks to class, and I made the mistake of bringing blocks that I didn’t even like.


A couple weeks before QuiltCon, I dug through my orphan blocks bin and pulled out all the extra blocks from my Perseverance Prevails quilt. Since I had already made a whole quilt out of them, I decided to cut them up and sew them back together again so that they looked a little different. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn’t like the end result, but I didn’t have time to make more blocks from scratch, so I just rolled with it. I chose to pair the blocks with a gray solid, because someone at the Seattle MQG meeting had asked if they could make their postcard swap an “unvalentine” and I wanted to play with that idea.


After I returned home from QuiltCon, I kept working on this quilt. I made a scrappy back for it and basted it in March 2015. Initially, I quilted it with straight lines in gray thread, but I really wasn’t feeling it and set the quilt aside. It languished in my WIP pile until I decided in May 2016 to suck it up and finish it. I decided to leave the quilting I had already done as is and continued with pink thread. That was a good decision. Even though I still don’t like this quilt overall, I like the look of the pink thread against the gray solid. I finished the quilting at the end of May at a Seattle MQG sew-in, and bound it in June. My goodness, am I glad to have finished this quilt! It’s my first completed quilt in 2016 and I hope it will inspire me to tackle more of my WIP pile and finish something else soon.


3 comments:

  1. I love the story of this quilt! Thank you for sharing it. It is so beautifully set off by the gray!

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  2. Congrats on sticking with it and finishing your quilt. Those pink blocks look really good against that gray background, and the pieced backing is so fun! Love that you call it the Unvalentine quilt! :)

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  3. I think those blocks look great...glad you stuck with it!!!

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