Home is Where the Heart Is -- Part 2 of 2

Hi all -

I've finished the quilting on Home is Where the Heart Is and have put on the binding. Tomorrow I'll add the hanging sleeve and the label and then it will be done. Just in time for the June 2 wedding, since I'll be leaving early Wednesday morning!

I'm really pleased with the quilting! Here's a picture of the entire quilt:

It's mostly quilted realistically using matching threads. I change thread colors a lot when I quilt and I used somewhere between 10 and 15 different colors on this quilt. The SID quilting was done with YLI invisible thread; the rest of the quilting was done using different colors of 40 wt Glide.

For the grass, I used a flame design kind of like Leah Day's Radio Static quilting design. For the fence, I used a wood grain design like what Angela Walters does:

The trees all have zig-zagging lines like branches in the tree part and vertical wavy lines in the trunks to simulate bark.

The sky is wavy horizontal lines with swirls to simulate wind.  I started out trying to do Angela Walters' Elongated Swirls in the sky, but I didn't like how my version of those swirls looked so I ended up using mostly regular swirls.I think I wasn't making the swirl part big enough. I'll have to work on those again in another project. The deer is just SID quilted with a little black bead added for his eye.

The stars were quilted with a continuous curve design.

The sun has echo quilting in the base semi-circle with squiggly rays coming out. I really like how the rays look!

On the hearts, I quilted the couple's names and the wedding date. To quilt the text, I first went to dafont.com and downloaded several free cursive fonts. I played around with them and found one that I liked and printed the text on paper. I traced the text onto water-soluable stabilizer, pinned the stabilizer to the quilt and quilted over the lines three or four times. There was a lot of tying and burying threads for this part, but cursive was certainly a lot better than printing for this part! I like how this turned out, but after it was done I felt like it would look better if I had put the text a little bit higher up on the hearts than I did.

For the house, I quilted details into the door. The mail slot was a little wonky, but I still like it. I added a button for the doorknob. In the window is their dog, Willie. I quilted the background of the window with back-and-forth lines so that Willie would pop out of the window. I really liked the lines in the fabric on the roof so I quilted straight lines on either side of each line on the roof to make the lines pop. Then I filled the spaces in between with herringbone quilting. (I really like how the fabric pattern lines up perfectly in the house and the roof. I figured out an easy way to do this with paper piecing that I'll share sometime. I didn't think to take pictures while I was figuring it out for this project so the details will have to wait.) I added a "WELCOME" sign with the quilting to break up the big space on the front of the house. This was done the same way as the text on the hearts. The last part of the quilting I did was the sides of the house. I really couldn't decide how to quilt those areas. Since I wasn't getting any good inspiration, I ended up deciding to just quilt it using the pattern of the fabric as an inspiration. I like the texture that was created, but after looking at it for a while I noticed that it looks exactly like alligator skin so that's all I can see now when I look at it. Still cool, but a bit weird!

When I was done with the quilting, I had to soak the quilt to get rid of any remaining water-soluable stabilizer in the text quilting and to soften up the stabilizer used to applique the hearts. I'm really happy with how flat it blocked and love the crinkly look that the soaking gave the quilting. All of the pictures of the front of the quilt above were taken after the blocking so you can (hopefully) see the lovely texture it created.

I'm so glad to get this done by the deadline! I also finished my sweater so I'll have to take pictures and will post about that soon (or maybe after I get back from the wedding if I'm too busy beforehand).

Nancy