Colorways by Vicki Welsh

This is a big quilt! I think it’s about 95″ square. Mom spent a lot of time designing and making this quilt so I wanted to do something other than a pantograph. But it also needed to be soft for a bed quilt. That’s where my design freeze came from. I love over quilting with rulers and a lot of fill work but that would have made for a very stiff quilt.

I started with the white spaces and devised a flower and leaf motif that would work.

I quilted the larger “square” first and then the side sections. After that I moved on to the borders.

The leaf was the easy part. That’s my go-to leaf that I used in almost ever custom quilt in some way. The two inner batik borders just got two parallel lines to keep the quilt texture soft. I wanted heavier quilting in the outer border to prevent it from being wavy or stretchy. I did it on a diagonal to mimic what I did in the green border blocks in the center of the quilt.

More flowers and leaves with some continuous curves finished off those 4 blocks. I hit a real procrastination barrier with the last section….all of the pieced blocks.

I kept trying to force a new design onto these. In the end I realized that I needed to stick with the flower for the white spaces and do the rest with continuous curves and some outline ruler work. You really can’t see any of the stitching on the print batik fabrics.

I used 2 colors of thread: a moss green Highlights in the white areas and a dark blue Magnifico in the blue areas. I used So Fine for the bobbin and even finished off a cone.

In the end, I’m really happy with the way it turned out but it should have taken about half the time that it actually did.

I now have a stack of veterans quilts to get through and loaded the first 2 yesterday.

I started with two of my own because I might be able to get the bound to count for 2 April finishes.