I saw a quilt like this posted by born2quilt back in October. I thought it would be just the thing to use up some scraps, practice some free-motion quilting on my "new-to-me" sitdown HQ 16, and end up with a baby quilt. I don't know what happened with the baby-quilt size because it finished at 57" x 82."
Math is not my strong suit.
There were alot of firsts on this quilt. I used Hobbs Heirloom 100 percent cotton batting for the first time. (I bought it by mistake thinking I was buying 80/20. I think I like the 80/20 better. This batting is very flat, and I don't think the quilting shows up as well.)
It's my first quilt done on the HQ 16. I'm still not in love with the machine. It certainly was roomy vs. my domestic machine, but there is so much new to learn with tensions, threads, and needles. I was just getting the hang of all that on my domestic machine, now I have to relearn it all on this machine. Call me lazy or just not liking to change.
I traced the leaf/curl wreaths on the lighter colored blocks on a light table with a blue washable marker. I used powder on the darker blocks as I came to them. The powder was harder to follow. I got really tired of making the wreaths by the time I finished 102 of them.
The feathers in the triangle borders were my favorite to do. They were totally free-form, and I was amazed at how uniform they looked when I finished.
I tried doing 'e' and 'l' loops around the outside border. I didn't like the look of that so I unsewed them... for two days!
It was replaced with straight line V's.
The nine-patch blocks were ditch quilted. The ditch quilting was done with monofiliment thread on my domestic machine, but the rest of the quilting was done on the HQ 16 with Superior 50-weight So Fine thread with different colors for the different blocks.