Grand Illusion Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July! I didn't do anything special for the 4th. We're always under high fire danger this time of year and, although people in our neighborhood are generally really responsible, I like to be home on the 4th so I can get the pets out if there's a problem. It was quiet around my house, but I did hear that someone else in the neighborhood heard someone shooting, which is prohibited under the current restrictions. And, of course, it's nice to relax and avoid any crowds!

I spent most of this week finishing my Grand Illusion quilt designed by Bonnie Hunter. This was Bonnie's 2014 mystery quilt. I did the piecing in 2014/15 and started quilting it some time ago, but got frustrated and put it away. I finally pulled it out a couple of weeks ago, determined to finish it. And now it's done!

Grand Illusion

"Grand Illusion" is a good name for this quilt because you can see the pattern from a distance, but up close it just looks like a jumble of shapes.

Grand Illusion - Close-Up of Front

It's so chaotic, it's hard to see the quilting on the front of the finished quilt. As usual, I used left-over units and fabric for the back. I love how it turned out!

Grand Illusion - Back

You can see the quilting on the back. I used what I'm calling "stream of consciousness" quilting. I saw this somewhere a long time ago, but can't remember the artist's name or what she called it so I have to just go with my name for it. I just quilted whatever motifs I felt like doing that I thought would look good. I ended up using a lot of common background fills and sprinkling in every flower shape I could think of. 

Grand Illusion - Quilting Close-Up 1

Grand Illusion - Quilting Close-Up 2

Grand Illusion - Quilting Close-Up 3

Some of the motifs aren't as smooth or pretty as I would have liked, but I think they look good in combination. It was really difficult wrangling the large quilt through my sewing machine, especially with the dense quilting and the puffy wool batting, but I got it done and I love the result! And the added bonus is that I get joy every time I look at all of the different fabrics that I used. 

When I was tired of quilting, I turned on the TV and worked on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I'm trying to finish up my second large rosette for this quilt. I'm on the last round of the rosette, which is a partial round of star units. I picked the fabrics for this round and started preparing the pieces.

La Passacaglia - Second Rosette

I laid out some of the chosen fabrics so you can see how the unit goes together and how the colors look. I didn't get much done on this because I put the binding on Grand Illusion this week. I like to sew the binding to the front using the machine, then turn it to the back and hand stitch it. It takes a long time, but I really like the look and feel of this method. It took my all day Thursday and a couple of hours on Wednesday and Friday to finish the hand sewing. I had to stop before finishing on Thursday because the joint at the base of my thumb hurt too much to continue. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to continue on Friday morning since I haven't found anything that really relieves this type of pain, but I have some DMSO cream that was recommended by an online friend. I hadn't really had luck with this in the past, but I decided to try it again and this time wrap my hand in a microwave heating pad with it on. That really seemed to work for me. It felt pretty good right away and it seemed to be all better the next morning. I don't know if it was a fluke since this is the first time it has worked for me, but I thought I would share it with you guys just in case.

Finally, after putting in the last bits of quilting on Grand Illusion yesterday, I was motivated to work on my Tulips Are Blooming quilt. This quilt is based on the Floral Bouquet pattern in Jelly Roll Quilts by Pam & Nicky Lintott. I used the pattern for the center of the quilt, but changed the borders to something I like better. Last time I worked on the quilt, I had added a squares-on-point border, but was thinking that I might want to add another narrow white border to add some space between the squares-on-point and the binding. This additional border would make it easier to keep the points in the squares from being cut off. And, if I use the flower fabrics for the binding creates a separation between the squares and the binding. I looked at it some more and decided that I did want to add that border.

Tulips Are Blooming

I think this space looks good whether I use a white or colored binding, but I'm leaning towards the colored binding. I think the colored binding will look better and will be more practical since the binding is where you're most likely to get dirt on the quilt since that's where you touch it the most.

Well, that's it for this week....

Nancy