WIP Wednesday- La Havana Vieja, Part 3 #quilt

It’s me again, the husband. This is the third in what seems like the never ending saga of my first attempt at a quilt. In fairness, we were distracted by a wonderful vacation,

Reykjavik

Vatnjökull

and a trip back to my wife’s hometown to visit her family.

The Badlands

Now that we are all back in town,  I have once again begun to work on my quilt in earnest.

We had picked a nice backing fabric, and decided to keep the backing simple.

Backing fabric, upside down in the picture, but we did it right side up!

We simply sewed together two pieces, trying to match them up the best we could.  We cut the batting, and pinned the front. It is a queen sized quilt, and we used nearly every safety pin in the house.  While the quilt was still taped to the ground, I did the drawings for the palm trees on the side.

I let the quilt sit and marinate for a couple of days, while I worked up the courage to start quilting. I started with the black lines, using a walking foot.  This part wasn’t too difficult, since it was similar to the sewing that I did for piecing. 

After that, I decided to quilt the palm trees.  I did a little bit of practicing on some scraps but that didn’t really prepare me for just how difficult it is to wrangle a queen sized quilt around a machine. Free motion quilting: looks easy, isn’t easy.  It certainly didn’t help that I used thread that my grandmother had left behind when she died around eight years ago. The thread itself, was probably closer to 30 years old. The color was perfect, but it was  pretty worn. I got a lot of thread breakages, which slowed the process down. My first palm tree is a little wonky.

Wonky palm tree

I think the second one turned out better.  I decided to do the palm trees first, since I could draw these out, and I was using non-contrasting thread. I found out that using the non-contrasting thread can hide a lot of sins!

I think my next step is to quilt the louvers for the blinds, and put the railings on the balcony. I plan to use bias tape for the railings, and appliqué them like I did the “lead” on the stained glass window