A new project that I have been designing like crazy for is my
Cantaloupe Vineyard cheater quilt. When finished it should be a little under 6' long, and a little over 5' 3" wide. Now obviously it's not quite as big of an undertaking as a true patchwork quilt, but it is a large enough project that it's getting spread out over a couple of months.
This is an approximation of what the finished quilt should look like:
Of course things change from the concept to the execution, and even that has changed over time.
This quilt started out as a
1 Yard Cantaloupe Quilt Block that I had designed to show off the Cantaloupe Vineyard fabrics side by side.There wasn't much of a plan when I ordered the yard from Spoonflower and got a cheap yard of teal cotton elsewhere to back it. After simply layering it with batting , sewing around the edges, and turning it right side out, it was quilted. At first I thought it would be finished and that I would take a few photos of my little project before moving on.
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| This is the original quilt block, and in the background is my store bought comforter that the quilt is meant to match. |
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| Here you can see the teal backing |
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| The quilting shows up more dramatically on this side. |
Then spoonflower had one of their weekly contests with a theme of family portraits, and I immediately wanted to do something with my cats on it. Putting them on the quilt I had just made seemed like a perfect idea, but the medallion made it awkward to put them anywhere but dead center. So I made a different, less centered quilt pattern as a backdrop, and
I loved it. A lot.
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| I cut it before taking photos. |
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| A close up of Regelwyn and Richard. If you look around them you can see little shadows! |
Adding it to the existing quilt block became my new plan. This meant cutting the new yardage in half and placing those on either side of the medallion making a 6' length. Cutting it evenly in half as seen in the overall plan above was changed once I got the actual fabric in my hands. The shadows around the cats, giving it that trompe l'oeil effect of the almost life size cats sinking into the quilt, would have been cut off a bit by dividing it squarely in the middle. So the separation was moved further up to where it made a cleaner line along the tops and middles of a row of diamond blocks.
This 6' fits perfectly along my queen size mattress, however the width is a little awkward. (Spoonflower's basic cotton has a 42" width) So the border along the sides was my solution. This also takes a single yard, except the yard is divided into 4 panels. Two vertically on each side gives the quilt an added 21" making the ensemble fit almost perfectly on my bed.
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| Bottom |
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| Middle |
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| Top |
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| Rough fitting of the whole quilt. |
Anyway the plan is to sew together and quilt the new panels the same way as the center panel before hand sewing everything together. I have yet to buy the backing and batting for the newer pieces, and will probably start the extensive work after the holidays. Hopefully there will be more photos of the actual creation process in the next instillation of this series :)
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