Siblings Together Quilting Bee

Hi this is Carol from the Running Hare.  I've written this post once and whilst trying to copy it to send to Lynne, I deleted the whole thing in error. So annoying!!!So, I'll start again. I have been meaning to write the post about finishing my STQB quilt for some time but real life has been very busy. Nearly a year ago now Lynne set up a quilting bee to make quilts for Siblings Together. She has written about the charity here. You have probably seen a lot of other posts with the quilts we have all made. I was Ms March and I received a lovely huge bundle of Storybook by Kate and Birdie. This was kindly donated by Moda. I added my own white crosshatch (Botanics from Architextures by Carolyn Friedlander) and chose Melissa's original Happy quilt-a-long as my pattern.  My lovely bee mates made up the blocks ( in fact I have enough partial blocks left to make another quilt for ST at some future point). So here it is in all it's glory:

And here is the back:

The backing is another Kate and Birdie fabric ( Hydrangea in Sunrise from the Bluebird Park collection). This was very kindly donated by Alice at Backstitch. I used my own wadding (Warm and Natural) because I was keen to get it finished. Hadley sent me some wadding which had been donated by Lady Sew and Sew and I will use this for the other ST quilt in due course.The binding is the yellow fabric from  Storybook which I think finishes it off perfectly:



I decided to try out my fledgling FMQ skills on this quilt which was a very 'interesting' experience. I quickly discovered that I needed a proper ruler to sew the straight lines without ruining my machine. I bought one (now the quilt is finished) called a Line Tamer (more commonly known as the Lion Tamer for obvious reasons!).  The flowers, though far from perfect, were much easier than I thought. I used a Frixion pen to mark out the quilting lines and this worked really well. I was worried that the pen might leave marks, especially on the white fabric, but it was fine - they just ironed right away. The straight lines were much, much harder and this is something I will have to practice.

  

I used my favourite So Fine in colour 401 for the quilting, both in the bobbin and for the topstitching.

The problem with doing fancy quilting is that you have hundreds of threads to sew in at the end. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to move across the quilt without stopping and starting (fewer threads to sew!) but was only partially successful at this.   Anyway, I'm very pleased with the end result and I hope it will make some girl (it's definitely a girlie quilt) very happy.