New Quilt Is Coming Along

Here's a quick quilt update.  Uh, that's a quick update...definitely not a quick quilt.

The pattern I fell in love with is an altered and modernized version of an old pattern called a Bullseye.  Three concentric circles are sewn onto a square background.  Normally, as I understand it, with a Bullseye pattern one somehow sews all the circles together in a normal quilt fashion, with edges tucked under and no stitching showing.  Sounds awfully difficult.

This pattern changed that, and some other things. Firstly, all the circles are top-stitched about a 1/4" in from the outside. This allows the edges to fray slightly with washing and wear. Love it!   The fabrics are randomly put together. That's part of the fun of a "scrap" quilt like this.  Random is good.

Next, once all the circles are sewn onto the squares, you cut the squares into quarters.  AND THEN, you mix it all up!  Again with the random. 

Once I got my circles sewn on, I was too excited to wait and see what they might look like when I mixed the quarters up.  I folded them in quarters and laid some out to get a preview of how it might look in the end.

Kind of funky, huh?

But fun!

Frankly, I'm a little concerned that I'm not going to like it when it's all done.  All those beautiful fabrics just don't seem to be showing themselves off very well.  But I'm holding off getting bummed about it until I actually get all my re-quartered squares sewn together into the big quilt top.

Once I get all that sewn together I'll also decide what fabric to use as the inner and outer borders.  Then, I have to decide on the backing material(s).

I'm making a queen sized quilt.  The shop where I've been going to classes has a "long arm quilting machine" and they charge anywhere from 1 cent to 3.5 cents per square inch for quilting.  A long arm machine is what it sounds like: it has a deep reach for quilting.  Not only that, it's a computer with thousands of programmable patterns.  The quilt is rolled onto a frame, stretched tightly, and the machine goes to town.  That is, if it's one pattern that goes throughout the whole quilt.  If there are select spots to be quilted in a stop and start pattern throughout, then it's more difficult and costs more.  Such is my quilt.  I figured out it would cost me over $300 to have quilted.  

So, guess who's going to be spending the winter hand quilting!

You know, quilting is DANG EXPENSIVE!