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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Purple People Eater

Previously I posted about this purple medallion quilt that has been in my UFO list for longer than any other item. Years in fact.  Over Thanksgiving I did the stabilizing quilting and stitch in the ditch on my mom's longarm and I finished the rest of the quilting while I was there over Christmas.

I'm so excited to have finished it, but the quilting didn't go nearly as well as I had hoped.  I actually had a mini-meltdown about it before just deciding it was an old quilt anyway, and wasn't going to be perfect.  I wanted to put octopuses in the corner blocks in some contrasting thread;  I figured they could be flowy and wouldn't look weird if they didn't match each other, but in the end they're a bit busy for the quilt and show lots of mistakes.



In the center medallion, I just put different fillers in every two sections.  I used a fairly blendy light pink thread (all the thread for quilting is, Isacord which I love).  Some of them look ok, like these two, and some look terrible. Sorry, not going to show close ups of those sections!





I am fairly pleased with the green leafy border pattern; I've put that pattern in every quilt I've quilted on the longarm so I can do it fairly well.


I'm also pleased with the feathers I put in in the dark purple blocks.  I put a long swirly curvy line through the blocks and then feathered along that as a stem, filling all the space.  Since I used a dark purple thread, you can't see it very well on the front, but on the back it stands out better (second image).




Here's the final quilt, it's too big for my design wall so was very hard to photograph; the whole left side was sort of hanging off into space.  It's actually pretty square although in spite of my best efforts the corners are a bit stretched.  I'm so pleased to be finished with it and am anxious to cuddle underneath it on the sofa.

Purple People Eater c. 2012 Shannon Conley 60" x 78"


Any of you out there finish looooong-time UFOs lately?