Bloggers Quilt Festival: Citrus Sails!!

I am so excited because it's time for the Bloggers Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side. Twice a year she hosts an awesome linky party where bloggers can link up a quilt of their choice. I have seriously been looking forward to this for quite sometime...and not just because I have something to share for the first time - but because there is always a ton of inspiration to be found.

Anyway so I put my thinking cap on and was trying to decide what quilt I wanted to share. I wanted it to be something I was really proud of and that would showcase who I am as a quilter/designer. I had one in mind that was almost finished (dang binding needs to be sewn on!), but due to my recent hand injury that would have to wait. So I decided to show the Citrus Sails Quilt. Yes, I know I recently blogged about it (in hindsight, I could have waited to post that until today but I was too excited to wait) but now you can read about it all over again! =)

 I am seriously am in love with this quilt. I was lucky enough to have some help piecing it from my fellow uber talented members of the Inspire Circle of the do.good.stitches charity sewing bee. I think that this quilt reflects my quilting style - simple, bright, a bit different and incorporates the use of solids. When I first designed this quilt, I knew I wanted to feature triangles and at the time I was enamored with half square triangles and thought it would be a great bee quilt. Having spent many days in a hospital myself, I wanted to create a quilt that could bring some cheerfulness to an otherwise drab hospital room. I immediately thought of bright citrus colors paired with gray. The gals in the circle did an awesome job of helping make my vision into a reality.

As much as I love the front of this quilt, I almost love the back more. Originally I was going to use a solid gray back but since I had 3 leftover squares, I decided to highlight them in each of the colors and sew a strip down the back. I really like this effect. I am a fan of solid on the back because I think it showcases the quilting, which I quilted on my machine in straight lines on a diagonal to bring some dimension to the quilt.

I finished it up with a dark gray binding (kona pepper, I believe) which I think frames it nicely. After I washed it and took it out of the dryer I took it up to the mountains for a photo shoot. And as luck would have it the bright summer colors looked nice against the fall leaves. Yay.

Lest you think that this entire experience was a cakewalk - think again (lining up all those points was a nightmare!) I also chose this quilt to showcase because I learned a very important lesson: Sometimes it is the imperfections that make the quilt perfect. Yup that's right, who cares if the points don't all line up. It still looks great at the end!

Anyway I'm going to sit back with my Starbucks salted carmel hot chocolate (aka the best fall drink ever) and spend some quality time being inspired by the many quilts at the bloggers quilt festival. Join me. But first go get a salted carmel hot chocolate, you'll thank me later - trust me.

Citrus Sails Quilt

Front of Citrus Sails Quilt

Back of Citrus Sails Quilt

As part of the do.good.stitches charity bee, I've been quilting the top from my month. This entire project has been somewhat of a nightmare to be honest and I was about ready to throw in the towel on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, I persevered and I learned quite a few lessons along the way.

Lesson 1: Being a perfectionist isn't always perfect.  My design involved many half square triangles and lining up the points gave me a headache. I spent hours sewing and unpicking blocks together in an attempt to get them to line up perfectly. Luckily, my husband intervened. He told me that the Native Americans intentionally put a mistake in any handmade thing they make to show that it is created with human hands and humans are imperfect -- acknowledging that only God is perfect. I thought that was a rather interesting way to look at things. So I decided to embrace my inner imperfections and sew together the blocks to the best of my ability.

The front of the quilt - you can't even tell that some of the points don't line up perfectly!

Lesson 2: Sometimes simple is better. When I went to quilt it, I had a complex plan in my head and ended up with some (okay a lot) of puckers on the back. I couldn't for the life of me quiet the perfectionist side of my brain and I spent the better half of a day unpicking the quilting. Then I redid it in much simpler way and I like it much better.

The quilting - diagonal straight lines.

Lesson 3: Machine binding a quilt isn't the worst thing. I've always been opposed to machine binding (mainly because I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted) and have spent hours hand sewing my bindings. But because I was so behind on the deadline for this quilt, I bit the bullet and bound it by machine. And ya know, it doesn't look half bad.

What lessons have you learned while quilting?

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