Quilted Christmas

I can finally check one thing off my long list of Christmas projects. I'm frustrated because this is taking me too long. The actual time spent on a project is not unreasonable but the elapsed days from start to finish is too long. I only work a couple hours at a time at most and skip some days. At the rate I'm going I can only get one small quilted item done every 7-10 days. I should have started these projects six months ago, which actually was the plan, but I didn't, so now my plan is to do 2-3 other items before Christmas and will very likely end up only doing 1 or 2 items.  I'll probably be working on Christmas projects in January and February next year!

But for now this small quilt is done. 

It's based on a dark/light HST design I created on my design wall. I don't usually use the design wall for this step in the process. I usually use a drawing program on my computer or plain old graph paper but I didn't want to mess with that this time because I expected to make several changes to find a design I liked. It seemed like it might be faster to use black triangles on the white wall to work out the layout.

I don't know if it was faster but when I was done the design was right there on the wall to guide me while I put the actual block together.  I might do this again when I'm working on a design where I want to play around with the placement of the dark and light elements.  And seeing the design closer to a 'real life' scale rather than on a piece of paper or computer screen I think is a bonus.

Below is the finally quilt before washing. Of course my machine quilting is horrible.  Even with the walking foot my machine struggles getting over joints in a design like this. Some of the triangle intersections are eight seams coming together into points. That's a bump no matter how much you iron it. But I do machine quilting now because it's fast and the only way I can get anything done quickly. But I'm not a big fan of the machine quilted look but I am a big fan of getting things done. 

And in the end after all is done and the quilt is washed all those imperfections will become lest noticeable.

I guess.

I still see them. 

But I really didn't feel like spending 12 hours hand quilting this. It's a shame because the piecing came out really accurate. I spent the time to pin every intersection so all the points came out nice and pointy. Now I feel like I ruined it with that crappy machine quilting. 

But it looks nice enough for its purpose, covering an end table. 

And my end tables are usually piled with all kinds of stuff and books. 

So I guess this one is good enough. But I will still try to do better on the next one. Which I plan to make using the same pattern but with a red and white snowflake fabric. I'll be back in 7-10 days, or more, with pictures of the next one. But first I'm making some ornaments.

Thanks for reading. 

Aileen