Everything’s coming up roses

Posted by mb. on May 19, 2014 in show and tell | 5 comments

It is Bloggers Quilt Festival time again & I entered a quilt that is a variation on a block we lottoed in ?2011? so Sophie suggested I do a write-up for here.  I call the block 8:56 (4 to 9), but in Block Lotto-land it is D4P or disappearing 4-patch.

For this quilt I sized up the blocks (6.5″ strips to make the 4-patches 12.5″ then sliced & flipped for a final block size of 11″.5 unfinished/11″ finished).  Each block is one part large scale floral with pink rosebuds & one part scraps that I thought went with it smoothly.

More to the point, I also toyed with the width of the center cut.  I was interested in seeing how  changing the size of the field of color changed the look of the block.  In some cases I cut the same old narrow strip & flipped that, in other I effectively cut the original 6.5″ blocks in 1/2.

For the back I used a single piece of white muslin, mostly because it was easy.  But because of it, you can see the quilting which is rather typical of the quilting I usually do.  I call it free motion with walking foot.  In this case I used a pink, red, yellow variegated thread & made smaller, gradually larger triangles until I didn’t feel like it anymore.  Then I would shoot off another smaller gradually large triangle more or less along an imaginary X starting at the corners & going through the center of the quilt.  After I was really sick of triangles, I went back & filled in between the triangles (which I think of as roses) with dark green outlining & jagged lines (which I think of as leaves & thorns).

In the end the quilt was more or less 54″ on all four sides.  I would measure it but I gave it away to the people who kept our cow with their bull over the winter solstice & hopefully we will have a dairy-baby next winter.