Spring 2012 Bloggers’ Quilt Festival

 Amy over at Amy's Creative Side is doing a Bloggers' Quilt Festival.  Basically quilt bloggers from all over get together and link up to her post to show off their work and get inspiration from other quilters.  There are prizes and it looks like a lot of fun!  I've never participated before but I'm really excited to participate this time.

Please excuse the mess that is the floor around the quilt and just try to see the quilt.  It's hard with four small people to get the house clean enough to be picture worthy.

 I had a really hard time picking which quilt to feature.  There are so many that I love!  In the end I narrowed it down to three (see the other two here and here) but I landed on this Double Wedding Ring quilt.  This was the most intricate quilt I have made but I don't know if it was the hardest.  There were A LOT of little tiny pieces.  In the end we counted over 1,400 pieces.  Sadly I had to cut some of them twice as the pattern in the book was wrong - more about that in the picture part.

 As usual for me this quilt was a gift.  My hubby's little brother was getting married and I decided to make them a quilt.  Silly me let my husband pick the pattern and he has no idea how hard some of these things are.  As punishment I made him help me cut out a lot of the pieces after I traced them.  I was sad to see it go but the gasp I got as I revealed it to the family was worth it.  They've now been married for 18 months and use the quilt to snuggle up and watch movies on the couch.

I learned to not always trust patterns, which is really frustrating.  Also I learned that making an odd shape pattern piece is difficult but I've got the skills.  Finally, I learned that I can do hard things!

Here's the fun picture part with a little more detail...

Here a picture of the work in progress.  It was so hard to keep my four small children out of all of these pieces as I tried to sew them all together.

It seemed to take forever to get to this point.  All the pieces are ready to start going together and making it bigger.  I just love the colors and that each fabric had some sort of plant theme going on.  They both went to school for something plant related (soil science and landscaping).

I started to sew the football shapes together and they were a disaster.  I unpicked and I cried and stressed and then I figured out the pattern was just wrong and it wasn't my skills that caused the problem.  So with a lot of fancy math (my other love) I figured out the problem and made the new football shape.  I had to trace and cut out 49 more which was a pain.

I finally got them all put together and ready to assemble into the big quilt.  The curves were easier than I anticipated and it went pretty smoothly.

I like to machine bind some of my quilts but when the quilt calls for it I take the time to hand-sew them.  This one sure did with scallop edges and the fanciness of it all.

Here's the backing I chose.  I love it!  The blue isn't the same as the one on the front, it's kind of teal but I love it just the same.

Here's a close-up of the sewn rings.  I love the patchwork where the all come together.  I love the colors.  I just plain LOVE IT!

This is the one and only time this quilt ever touched my bed.  It's queen size and I think it works perfectly.  After my hubby saw this he said his brother didn't deserve it and I should make him another one (mostly joking).  By then I only had a week until the wedding and that just wasn't an option.  Eventually I may make one for myself but in the mean time I have this picture to look back on.

Thanks for reading this crazy-long post about my adventures in quilting.  Remember to hop on over to Amy's Creative Side and check out other quilts on the Bloggers' Quilt Festival.