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First quilt of the year


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I just finished my first quilt for 2007 and am pretty happy. This one will never be a show quality quilt but it was just a fun quilt to make. I did it for a challenge for a retreat I will attend next month.

I am most happy with the background quilting that just sort of happened on this one. I am going to call that "swirls and spikes".

You can see the quilt and a few close ups on my blog:

http://enchantingquilts.blogspot.com/

If someone can tell me how to post a photo here I will do that but I cannot figure it out :)

Thanks for looking!

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ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL. I was right. the quilting made the quilt. It is so happy and cheerful. You did an awesome job in both the piecing and the quilting. You should be very very proud of yourself!!! Congratulations.

I love your swirls and spikes!!!

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Oh my, what a beauty.

I love the fill you did. Swirls and spikes is a good name for it. I noticed that you have several thread changes. How many and what thread did you use?

It looks like King Tut. I love the hub and spoke treatment in the big dotted orange one and the swirls in the hot pink and black one.

I don't understand exactly how a challenge works. But if this is going to a show, it is going to draw lots of attention!

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On my blog entry for today I have a photo of the challenge fabric..........................it is likely the most ugly fabric I have ever worked with!!!!

To answer the question about what a challenge is. There were 26 quilters that accepted a yard piece of this fabric and had almost a year to make a quilt from it. The finished quilts will hang for two weeks in a fabric store in Tempe AZ that selected the fabric and be judged by viewers choice. Mostly a challenge is an oportunity for a quilter to take a fabric or set of rules or both and creat an origional work from them which is then judged against all the other entries.

As for thread. Yes that is indeed King Tut in the background. It is a wonderful thread to work with. The other threads are all Signature 100% cotton and include both varigated and solids. I used a varigated pastel, purple haze, and a harvest colored varigated. Solids include red, and pink and maybe something else. The beauty of quitlng for myself is that I do not need to keep track of how many thread changes and I will choose whatever I want for a particular part of the quilt.

All of the quilting was freemotion and I created as I went. I started in the top left corner with a swirls and spikes and jsut kept going with those. I have done similar designs and the day I was doing that background it all jsut clicked and before I knew it I was finished. I did go around the outline of each shape as I got to them while I was filling the background. The circles were each done as I found inspiration for doing something in them. In some cases the center was a different color than the rest of the shape. I think there is one where I used 3 thread colors in the same circle. It was all jsut playing with thread and having fun.

As for doing a fill that is uniquely yours. I like to look at what other people do. I study it and then will draw it. Sometimes I draw it just like theirs and sometimes I will change it from the beginning. Then I will put it away and begin to draw again this time from memory and I begin to change it to please myself. I will draw it over and over and sometimes over a period of days. Pretty soon it is a doodle I can draw anywhere and it is now what I consider my own (my own version to say the least). Usually when I want to do a particular design I have done before I will get paper and pencil and draw it again just to be sure I remember how I like to make it and then and only then go to my quilt and begin.

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