Finished or Not Friday: A Big Gift Project Is Finally Done!!

I am thrilled to start May off with a report on a big project completed.  Join me as I and other quilters check in at Quilty Girl Alycia's for this week's "Finished or Not Friday" projects! 

I will admit April closed with a lot going on and I must say that quilting was a haven in a storm of health and home repair issues.  For a couple of years now, I have been trying to finish a big projct:  making gift quilts for three members of my community garden's Steering Committee.  

I have displayed my quilts at the Art Shows our garden has hosted and the Committee members had been as enthusiastic about them as other attendees of the shows.  The last held one we held was in 2023 and I had provided a quilt to raffle off at it.  

When the winner of it was one of the four Committee members,  I immediately hatched a plan:  now was the perfect time to make quilts for the other three members!

I actually had a head start on that since I had actually set out to make two quilts for raffling off.  I had used what has become my "go to" and favorite "simple to piece" quilt:  a "9 Fat Quarter Disappearing Nine Patch" quilt that I learned how to make from a You Tube video.  Despite the quickness of the piecing, what I have learned over time in making these is that, at least for me, it takes me a good bit of time to make the fabric choices and placement of them within the top.  As part of the "disappearing" technique, some of the fabrics wind up getting flipped or turned from their intial orientation in the starting nine patch layout.  Once pieced back together to create the top, then I sometimes get hung up on how I want to quilt them.  

Edited To Add:  I realize that for the rest of this, it would also be good to join in over at Andree's "Quilting and Learning - What a Combo!" for this week's "Free Motion Mavericks" link up!

In the case of the second raffle quilt, I had decided to stitch it in what I believed would be a simple stipple variation called "Square Meander".  

I've since found demos of it here and it done in borders here.

I have done Stippling before but not this variation of it.  I thought it perfect for the quilt and I was excited to try it.  I got a late start quilting it right before the show but half way through got a little into my head about whether I was doing it "right".  Also since I was quilting it with a last minute deadline, I was also tense about whether I was filling the quilt space fast and evenly enough.  As a result I decided not to continue to stress myself out and abandoned finishing the second quilt in time for the show.  Of course the good news was that when the Committee member won the quilt I did get finished and I decided to make more, it meant I already had a half finished quilt underway!

Well the plan was to finish it and two more for the other Committee members by the end of that year in the hopes of presenting them at the garden's annual Holiday Party.  Yeah right, that didn't happen!  Then time, tides and "squirrel projects" meant I didn't pick back up on finishing the quilting on that second quilt until the start of this year!  

This time I was determined to get all of the remaining quilts done before our season opened at the end of April so I finally got back on the horse!  What also helped with that was seeing someone demonstrating at a virtual quilting workshop the exact same stitch pattern I had done.  Of course it was immedately confirmed that I had been doing it right all along and getting a grip on myself,  I finished quilting it in one day back in January.

Okay one down and two to go!   Later that month, I pieced the next two quilt tops and finished the backings for both of them right before we made our annual winter visit to my MIL's during the week of Valentine's Day.  I swore when I came back I would quilt them up and try to have them done by the end of March, well before the season opening.  

However, at that virtual sumit I had also learned of two ideas that I wanted to employ on one of the quilts.  To start, in the center of the quilt I wanted to stitch a detailed echoed Heart motif with additional "Ribbon Candy" motifs stitched between the echoed areas.  I was hoping to take advantage of a Ribbon Candy workshop by Esther Frenzel of IPatch and Quilt.  I signed up for it in the hopes of learning more about this motif which it turns out is infinitely more versatile than I had ever imagined.  This quilt could then be one of my practice pieces.  

Again, yeah right!!  Given that this was a gift, maybe using this as a practice piece was not the best idea and I remained terrified of "messing it up"!  So instead it took me a couple of weeks to let go of that idea and just go with the other motif I learned at the Summit and had already sketched out so knew I could easily and quickly execute:  a large "Ribbon Stipple".  

Once I defaulted to the simpler all-over pattern,  I quickly stitched up the second quilt in one day rather than the two I thought it would take.

And with that Quilt #3 was done!

For the last quilt,  I had already planned to go a more traditional route with the quilting by doing another familiar all over pattern: "Baptist Fans".  I have stitched this design on four prior quilts using four different methods.  The last time I did it on my MIL's longarm and prior to that was when I made my civil war repro "Piecing the Past" quilt.  That one I ruler quilted with Westalee templates (and you can see a demo of them in action here).  So I had no concerns that this was doable using a free-motion method and could be completed in two or three days.   

The quilting in progress.....

However, in the end, this one took me almost a week to get done!  The reason it went so slow is that I used 80 wt Wonderfil DecoBob thread to quilt it and it took a while to figure out what my Juki machine needed to work well with that thread.  As it turned out, I had purchased something very helpful when I was first introduced to this thread at 2024's Quilt Con show:

These needles made all the difference!  With the HX-5 high-speed machine needles I normally use on the Juki, I was having trouble with frequent thread breakage.  Then I switched to these and it was "swoosh!" and super fast stitching straight through!  I had spent a day each on the first two rows of stitching but after changing the needles was then able to do four rows in about the same amount of time on the third day, another three rows the next day and finished up the last row on the final day of stitching.  I had picked up a whole bunch of these spools during a recent eQuilter sale so needless to say,  I will now have to stock up on these needles for all future sewing with this thread!  Problems solved, I quickly finished trimming up and binding the quilt and now the last quilt was ready to go!

With the last two finished, all three were now ready for gifting which was done last Thursday and as you can see here, everyone was happy with what they received!

I had asked the committee member on the right to bring the raffled quilt that she won two years ago so I could get a picture of them all together.  I was thrilled to have finally had the chance to honor these ladies for founding our garden fourteen years ago and continuing to work very hard to keep it a going concern ever since!

I had pushed to get the quilts finished and gifted before our garden's season opening which was scheduled for the last Saturday in April and would be our garden's "Earth Day" celebration as well.  Although I got the quilts gifted in time, unfortunately we had to postpone the opening day event due to rain.  We had rescheduled it for tomorrow but rain is now forecast for that day too so we will be trying again the Saturday before Mother's Day which as of right now is forecast to be a sunny day.  

Thank you for joining me on the recap of this latest quilt journey.  I hope you are as excited as I am to see what has bloomed out of everyone else's quilt studio for "Finished Or Not Friday" this week over at Alycia's!  Also get some ideas for approaches to finishing your quilts with Andree's "Free Motion Mavericks" at "Quilting and Learning - What a Combo!"