I did it! I finally completed my Tilt-a-Whirl quilt!
Some back story on this – many, many years ago…aka back in 2012 when I did the Craftsy Block of the Month quilting class and made my very first quilt, I fell in love with one of the quilting techniques that we learned: paper piecing. I loved how precise everything was thanks to the paper piecing and it was one of my favorite blocks we did that year. When Amy Gibson, who had taught our Block of the Month class, released her Tilt-a-Whirl paper piecing quilt pattern I bought it as well as all the fabric I needed for it with great intentions of making that my next quilt.
Wellllll that was in 2013 and then Hudson was born in 2014 and….yep…I just haven’t quilted much since then. But here it is 2021 and I’m pregnant again but instead of nesting by wanting to clean every inch of my house or make a million freezer meals, this time I’m nesting by wanting to finish a bunch of projects, including this quilt that’s been sitting here patiently for years.
I started piecing the blocks together a few months ago and was really just hoping to get the quilt top done before the baby and not so much planning to do the whole thing but then I got on a roll and knocked it all out! I went with machine quilting this time, which made it go soooooo much faster! This was only my 2nd machine quilted project. My first was the Christmas tree skirt I made so I’m still really new to machine quilting. I was kind of nervous about quilting such a large quilt (I mean, it’s still only throw or twin sized but much larger than the tree skirt) and considered sending it to someone else to be quilted but ultimately decided it would be a good learning experience.
I just can’t get over how fast it was and pretty easy too! I stuck to a very simple straight line quilting pattern (though I can’t sew a straight line to save my life, even after taping off the lines to guide me, so we’ll call it straight-ish quilting) and it went really quickly. Then I bound it up and voila – all done!
I also tried my hand at making a tag for my quilt. In the past I’ve embroidered my name into the quilt backing to “sign” my quilt. This time I decided to give the letter/monogram function on my sewing machine a try as I hadn’t used that before. I used the machine to sign my name on a little scrap of fabric and sewed that on like a tag. It’s not quite as pretty as I’d like but it was quick and functional and gave me some practice with a feature of my machine that I hadn’t tried.
This quilt will likely live in our room as a decoration on our bed as well as extra covers if one of us gets cold. Way back when I bought the pattern and fabric that was the plan as I was doing our room in a blue, gray, and yellow theme.
I’ll be honest, like with the Christmas tree skirt, I’m not crazy about these fabrics anymore. When I purchased them years ago I hadn’t discovered the wonders of fabric buying online and so I was limited to what few options I had locally so I bought pretty much whatever blue prints I could find. If I were to rebuy for this quilt I would not have purchased the majority of these prints. They’re just not my style at all. But I already had them and hated to just throw them out and buy more so I went ahead with them. While part of me was like “Why am I spending so much time on a quilt that isn’t made with fabric that I love?” it also made me much more likely to try new things – I wasn’t as attached to the quilt and it wasn’t my “dream” fabric so I didn’t worry so much about getting it perfect and I was willing to try something new like machine quilting. So it was a good learning quilt!
And while no, the fabrics aren’t my fave I’m still really happy with how it turned out and think it’s a very pretty quilt! I’m definitely proud of it regardless and it’ll get lots of use keeping us warm which is, after all, the point of a quilt ;).
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