Swirly-Gig

Over a year later, I have finally finished this small spring project!


The pattern is called Swirly-Gig from the Paula Stoddard booklet Hooked on Charms. The fabric was from the Folklorique line by Fig Tree Quilts.

As I mentioned not too long ago, I'm not always in the mood to machine quilt. And I also struggle to decided exactly how I want to quilt something, so that's part of the reason why this sat for so long. But the colors in this project were definitely calling to me and this is the year I'm trying to finish projects, I forced myself to give it a whirl.

I think I might have quilted it to death, and it definitely was a project that I wondered when I would ever finish, as it kept going on and on. In the plain blocks, I quilted a feathered wreath and cross-hatched the centers, sizing them up from a pattern in the book Skillbuilder Mastery for Quilting by Machine by Renae Allen. In the pinwheel blocks, I stitched curves from corner to corner of the triangles (I don't know what this pattern is called, maybe orange peel or something like that). And I just did lines in the border to keep it simple.

I used a lovely green Aurifil thread on the top and a blue on the back; there are definitely some pop-throughs, but it was difficult to tell at the time because I was also using Golden Threads paper for the wreath outlines.

Here are some close-ups:



It's not perfect, but you have to start somewhere, right? While I've been quilting for about ten years now, I still consider my machine quilting skills to be relatively elementary. I still have a small stack of tops to machine quilt myself; we'll see how soon I tackle them. I can definitely promise you some piecing is in my future later this week!

I'm going to hang this in my cubicle tomorrow; perhaps the Dean will stop pestering me about the Valentine's project I still have hanging...