Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Winter Windows

Thank you for stopping by! I'm Emma, I live in Adelaide, South Australia, and I started quilting about 18 years ago, in my teens. I don't really have a set style (who needs labels?!); I do a bit of everything - as long as it's quilting! And I like to do everything myself, from the designing and construction to the quilting and finishing. I'm even getting into a bit of fabric painting.

Regular readers here will have seen this quilt before, as it was recently published in Australian Patchwork & Quilting magazine, and I was able to share it at last. But I've decided to make it my BQF entry, because I'm so proud of the quilting - which I did entirely on my domestic sewing machine; a Bernina 820.

The quilt top itself is simple enough; I added a few borders to some star blocks which I'd made the wrong size for another quilt and threw them together with a couple of borders. But I decided to make the quilting the real feature and really went to town; adding loads of details and creating secondary patterns. I made a deliberate decision to try and keep it relatively modern, with no feathers for a change!

(full back view)

Apart from a few structural lines done with the walking foot (e.g. the triangles in the borders), it's all free-motion quilted, using white and pale aqua BottomLine thread by Superior.

I created my own template to mark some parts, marked others freehand (both with a Sewline air erasable marker, which vanished beautifully on its own) and quilted others totally freehand.

(detail of the back)

The extra depth to the quilting is provided by a double-layer of batting, which gets difficult to manipulate on a domestic sewing machine, but is certainly effective.

I did try to track the hours involved in quilting this, but lost count. I estimate somewhere in the vicinity of 30 hours on the quilting alone. More photos and details blogged here.

Quilt statistics:
Size: 53 x 66in
Uses foundation-piecing, double-batting, free-motion quilting
Best Category: Home machine quilted quilt
Designed, pieced and quilted by: me
Completed: May 2012
Published in Australian Patchwork & Quilting Vol 21 No 11

Thank you for visiting! I do hope you'll pop back sometime and have a look at my other quilts.

Other quilts and their stories entered in the current Bloggers' Quilt festival can be found here.