1.08.2016

One Monthly Goal: January--Marina's Garden Quilt

I liked the accountability of A Lovely Year of Finishes, even if I didn't always get my blog posts done and linked.  But all things consider, I think I did pretty well last year, so can only go forward from here, right!  Now OMG: One Monthly Goal has taken up the monthly link parties, so I thought why not continue for 2016.

For January, my goal is to finish a mini quilt I started years ago.  It's honestly been so long, I've forgotten exactly when I started it.  But I found a file for it in EQ5 to give you an idea of how old it is.  For some reason I called the file "Marina's Garden Quilt," so that's what I'll keep calling it.  It was originally going to be a doll quilt for my daughter's American-Girl-sized doll.  But she never really got into dolls, and I never finished the quilt.  So now it's a mini quilt!  It's a simple pinwheel design, with solid blocks in between.  And then double straight borders with corner blocks.  I don't usually go for random block layouts, but I did with the pinwheel blocks.  Or as random as I can be.
My old EQ5 layout that I discovered when upgrading my software to EQ7
I started hand-quilting it way back when, but was just never crazy about how that was going.  (I've found I hate stitching-in-the-ditch when hand-quilting.)  Luckily I had only done three lines of quilting.  When I recently rediscovered the quilt sandwich among my UFOs, I decided to rip out the hand-quilting, and come up with a machine-quilting plan.  I pulled thread colors from my stash, but wasn't inspired beyond that.  Then this past week I picked it up again, thinking I would hand-quilt using a different pattern.  Did one block, and ripped it out again.  Then inspiration hit the other day, and I just started quilting on the machine.  (I'll save that for my month-end post.)  Now I just need to cut binding strips and get it bound!  And I guess come up with a label.
The quilt sat in the hoop for a long time, waiting for me to get back to it.  If you look closely, you might see the lines of hand-quilting.
I'll have to pull out the doll dress I made with the butterfly fabric, and see if I can round up my daughter's old doll for the finish pics!
I recreated the file in EQ7 before I found the old file.  I picked slightly different fabrics from the library for this one.

2 comments:

Heidi said...

Hi Suzie, I still use EQ6. It has been so long now that I guess I keep hoping EQ8 will come around and I can skip 7! My favorite monthly goals are UFO finishes!

Suzie's Armoire said...

I had EQ5/EQ6 on an old laptop. Then my quilting took a too long break that lasted several years. I started quilting again about a year ago, but didn't have EQ on my then current laptop. I forgot I had actually bought the EQ7 upgrade, but never installed it. I rediscovered it a few weeks ago while cleaning, and installed it on my new laptop I got for Christmas. A happy discovery that saved me some money, and having to wait for an EQ8. I transferred all my EQ projects from my other laptop. It's been fun looking back at my old projects.

Post a Comment