Mandolin quilt

I finished my Mandolin quilt!!! I am so excited, as this is my first ever hand-pieced quilt.

This quilt is my little scrapbook of the first two years of Cotton + Steel, with each block being made using prints from one of the first 20 collections. Each column represents the first four releases of the division (starting with Spring 2014), and each row captures the first four collections by each of the five original designers.

These first collections were released shortly after I started quilting, and are a large part of the reason why I became so hooked on this hobby. I mean, how awesome is this little sloth?

The top is hand-pieced using the awesome pattern designed by Jodi of Tales of Cloth. You can find the free tutorial here.

I quilted it by machine, using some free-motion organic wavy lines, and bound it with one of my favourite C+S basics.

It has been such a pleasure to work with some of my all-time favourite fabrics over the past year, and I can’t wait to see what these amazing women will release as part of their new venture as Ruby Star Society.

I'm linking up with Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal and the Q1 finish-along, as finishing this quilt was my goal for February and one of my proposed finishes for quarter 1.

Kat

February One Monthly Goal

I'm linking up with Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal and sharing my goal for February. This month I hope to finish my Mandolin quilt. I started it very late 2017 and it was my major hand-sewing project for 2018. I managed to finish assembling the top on NYE.

After a month of procrastibating (it's summer here in Australia and we've had a very hot January), I finally got the quilt top pressed and basted.

I've started the quilting but it is going very slowly. I initially started with matchstick lines but found I was getting lots of puckering (probably due to the hundreds of bias seams), so I had to rip it out and start again. I'm having better luck with 'organic' free-motion lines but still keep running into trouble, such as rogue bits of paper, my gloves (I've quilted the tip of the finger to the quilt twice already), and holes in my piecing (like the big one below).

I've still got a heap of quilting to go, but I'm in love with the texture.

I'm hoping to have it finished and bound by the end of the month so I can start to use and enjoy my first ever hand pieced quilt.

Kat