This is the quilt I have been working on forever it seems like...it is for my older daughter. In fact, she bought the fabrics at least a couple years ago. I thought the original plan was for her to come here and us work on one together...instead her life got awfully busy. And ours was pretty full for a time, too. So the fabric just sat.
After designing a couple or three different quilts in Electric Quilt, and showing them to my daughter, she chose this design. It is basically a Double Irish chain, only in a real Double Irish Chain, the blocks that are almost all tans here would be one fabric. And there is a difference in the choice of dominant fabric placement....and a couple other differences that doesn't make much difference anyway.
This quilt is machine pieced...and machine quilted. Free-motion quilted. That means I drop the feed dogs on my sewing machine, and put a special foot on the machine, and I feed and guide the quilt sandwich...I have to try to keep my foot pedal speed in sync with how fast I move the quilt under the needle, all while following the design. If I move too fast, while sewing too slow, I will have long stitches.The reverse of this is if I move the fabric slow, but put the pedal to the medal, the stitches are one right on top of the other...and impossible to rip out. There are not very many stitches that are too long, however it would be impossible to count the times I sewed too fast for the speed I was moving the fabric under the needle...but at least those don't really hurt anything.
I forget where I found the fleur de lis...I took it and had it enlarged, then used poster board to make a stiff pattern that I could lay on the quilt and trace around to mark the design on the quilt. Let me tell you, that was time consuming, plus after it was done the markings were hard to see.If you will enlarge this and notice the fleur de lis on the edge, you will see it is a bit different from the others. I had to redesign it to fit the space. The other fleur de lis go into the adjoining blocks a little bit...
The above photo is after it was washed and dried. It started as 87 1/2 inches. Quilting causes a little bit of shrinkage in size...but should have been much on this since there is not a lot of quilting. But I washed and dried it in the dryer because that is how it will be dried from now on...and its final finished size was 82 inches square. The batting said 3% shrinkage...but I don't prewash my fabrics either so some shrinkage there.
