Alphabet Soup Finished!

Wow, there are so many of you donating and requesting certain obis. Thank you so much. I am taking the ones chosen off of my sidebar and now my job will be to package them and send them off. I am so terrible at wrapping! My packages always look like something a kindergartner might make. Reflects on my sloppy personality.

Joan and Beatrice, I don't seem to have e-mail access for you both. Could you please send me your e-mail address? You are both on no-reply right now. You can find my e-mail address if you click the sidebar profile (About Me).

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I am happy to announce that I have finished my batik quilt. Alphabet Soup! There were a lot of challenges involved in this but I seem to have plowed through them and gone to completion.

Color choices were easy thanks to Jay who sent me a storehouse of batiks. These fabrics are mostly from him. The pattern was a simple one that seemed to show off fabrics well. The problems came with machine quilting!

I don't feel very confident about my machine quilting but I must admit that I'm through the nervous stage and now into the enjoyment stage. But this quilt is a big quilt and I didn't think I could tackle such a size on my little domestic machine. I made up the top in four pieces and went ahead and basted them separately for quilting.

I knew I wanted to try feathers and I marked off a wavering line in chalk and then quilted in feathers freehand. Not bad. I did get lost a couple of times but don't look closely.

After advice from Lorraine I quilted a small border pattern freehand and went on to do flowers.

And THEN I put the four quarters together. The back is such a patchwork piece itself! There wasn't enough of the blue when I went to the store, so I added pink to my shopping cart and sewed the two together. But when making each backing, there wasn't enough fabric in places so I was cutting and adding until who knows why this backing turned out this way!

I sewed the front together. I trimmed the batting and roughly sewed it together. I turned the seam under on the backing and hem stitched it down. THREE TIMES! My friend Mrs. Okutomi says she'd rather quilt a big quilt than do the connecting work. She may be right!

Next I chose a quilting pattern from Feathered Fibers and tried my hand on the small border. Oh good! I can quilt even a large quilt if it is only the edge! And back pouring over the photos on Feathered Fibers and I blatantly copied one of her border patterns. (Feathered Fibers really does her quilting on a long arm but I managed to use some of her ideas.)

I am so happy with the way the borders turned out! I used a chalk pencil again to draw in wavy lines and then drew in some feathers too but more often than not I'd get lost so the feathers are also basically freehand.

Yeah!!! Finished!!! I have yet to make a label and I'd better not put it off too long because I tend to get quilts with no labels on them. You may see this quilt again because I'm going to ask Mrs. Ochiai to photograph it with her wonderful camera this week.