Aves All Done

The first finish of the year is actually the quilt that started this blog.  Yep, I finally got around to quilting it.

Back in 2018 I thought I would take on a quilting challenge, so I signed up for Aves, a Block of the Week quilt by Kathryn Kerr.  For 45 consecutive Sundays, I receive the instructions to complete one block for the quilt and do a bit of construction on the way.

For the past five years the quilt top has been sitting in my spare wardrobe, along with a pieced backing and enough binding to go around.  But I have not quilted it because it was huge and heavy, and I had no idea what to quilt.  Until one night last year.  I couldn't sleep, so I was lying in bed thinking about quilts as usual and suddenly I had an idea.  Concentric circles. Next morning I pulled the top out, had a look and a think and figured it would work.

Because the top was so heavy (given there are so many bits of small fabric), I decided to only put enough wadding between the top and backing to allow me to do the middle circle.  I used the walking foot and started at the outside of the circle - given it was the shape I was after - and started quilting towards the centre.  I used the edge of the walking foot guided along the previous line, so that the circles were spaced a half inch apart.  The closer I got to the center, the worse my circles looked.  So I ended up taking some freezer paper and tracing an approximately 3" circle using a wine glass, and fixed that to the centre of the quilt.  Going around that and working outwards made the circles look much better.

Hours were spent quilting circles.  The further out I would get, the bigger the circle, the longer one would take.  And because I wanted the effect of concentric circles and not a spiral, I had to tie off my thread at the end of each circle and restart the next one.  I also had to stop and baste in more wadding every once in a while, which made the quilt heavier and heavier.  But at least I was continually quilting towards the edges.  

Eventually I reached the end of the quilting, which was done using orange thread I happened to have.  And when I laid it flat to look at it - oh dear - it was wavy, and it was going to be really tricky to square up.

So I thought I would give blocking a go, to try and get the quilt back in some sort of shape.  I'd never done it before, but figured it wouldn't hurt.  I put the quilt in the bathtub and hosed it down to get it wet, and then put it in the washing machine to spin out as much water as possible. 

I then proceeded to spend much longer than necessary laying the quilt out on my carpet, measuring distances from seams and centres, and edges, and pinning the quilt to the carpet.  I left it there for a day or so to dry, and it looked so much better afterwards.  Mostly square and mostly flat.  After that, trimming and binding was straightforward.

There are definitely a lot of problems with this quilt.  And I can point them all out if you are interested.  But I am still happy with it, and super happy it is finally finished.