Second Finish in One Week!

This coming Tuesday our quilt club will go to the local "Continuing Care" to donate several quilts for the comfort of those patients.  

The quilt I had intended to donate was the one my friend Susan chose this past week. So I realized I needed to finish up one of the other tops I made earlier this summer.  Since this was also intended to go to Continuing Care, this is the one I finished yesterday.

I stitched "in the ditch" between each of the blocks and between the blocks and the border, using invisible thread.  That will hold it pretty well.  But the blocks needed some stitching also.  So, with the invisible thread I stitched the quarter circles around the fans and around the "hand holds" at the corners of the blocks.  That left the full fabric blocks.

Quilting is so much a matter of making decisions: what pattern? what material combinations? what arrangement of blocks? what quilting patterns to hold it together?  I chose to echo the shape of the fans, and then had to make up a method to achieve that?  Here's my solution: use the cardboard template to echo the hand-hold.  Stitch it with two pink threads at the same time, in order for it to be "deeply coloured" enough to stand out on the black background print.

So far, so good.  What next?  Because it was very hard to make any temporary marks on the black background fabric to guide my stitching I came up with this:  I cut a 16" strip of blue masking tape into 1/4" wide strips.  Found a pleasing arrangement to imitate the fan design, and stitched alongside the tape with the same doubled pink thread.  I had to be sure to always stitch of the left side of the tape, or the sections would have been unequal.

I like the result.  Now I have five sections to stitch in the manner, snip a few hanging threads and the quilt is finished!  And it's not even due until next Tuesday