Quilting the 'Nearly Insane' Quilt

'Nearly Insane' quilt - made and quilted by Frances Meredith

Over the past few weeks this has pretty much been my view of the world at Fabadashery Long Arm Quilting, as I have been quilting one of my own hand pieced quilts.  Since February 2013 many of you may have seen me hand piecing a red and white quilt blocks for my 'Nearly Insane' quilt and now, in June 2016, it is finally quilted.  You can follow the full journey on my other stitching blog.

'Nearly Insane' Quilt - August 2015

Sometimes you start a project in all innocence of where it is going to lead you.  I just wanted a hand stitching project that I could carry around with me.  Gradually, as I accumulated more blocks, I started to think how I was going to quilt it.  Some of the pieces are small, with one 6" block having about 244 pieces in it.  I knew I wasn't up to hand quilting blocks with SO MANY seams in them.  I didn't even have the patience of struggling with it under my domestic machine, so this is when the seed was planted to invest in a long arm quilting machine.

Having decided I would be custom quilting it, I spent a lot of time ruminating about what design I would use.   I spent several days with rulers, paper and pencils trying out different ideas and auditioning them on the machine, until I found a design which I was satisfied with.  Once I had a road map in front of me, although time consuming, the stitching has been quite straightforward.

All the quilting on it has been hand guided and you can see in the picture that I have been using a long arm ruler to get the shapes and straight lines that I needed for the design.  The blue marks are a water soluble pen, which are washed out as you go.

The quilt is off the frame now and I am slowly stitching on the binding, ready for display at the Festival of Quilts in August 2016.