Bloggers' Quilt Festival: Fall 2011 entry "Sailing with the Flying Needles"

Wow!  Another wonderful Bloggers’ Quilt Festival! Thanks for organizing these, Amy. Go on over, folks, and check out all the super-fantastic quilts that folks have been making.

My favorite personal finish since the Spring Festival is my Sailing with the Flying Needles. It just turned out so wonderful.

81 x 81

Each month our local guild has a BOM drawing, where anyone who brings a block made in the designated pattern gets a chance to win the drawing for taking home all of those blocks. I got to take home all these wonderful sailboats last August.

I remember distinctly the moment I finally came up with how I wanted to arrange them: I was sitting in the car, waiting to pick up Dev outside the “band loop,” and I had to grab napkins out of the glove box to scribble down sketches before I forgot what I wanted to do.

Koko telling me this project is HIS

I already had the mariner’s compass. I had made it at the guild’s quilt retreat the prior March, and never got it finished up as the intended wall hanging. (I was really glad about that, as it went perfectly with the boat blocks!)

Its construction was an exercise in working with different ladies’ stitching levels, as some blocks had size issues due to uneven ¼” seams. I had to pick out and mostly redo a couple blocks because the seams were so large, the blocks were actually a good ½” too small. Eventually they all came together perfectly, and I was in love with the effect of the top.

Patty did a fantastic job quilting it for me. I had a panto of dolphins and sailboats that I wanted in the wide borders, and wanted roping on the turquoise outlines, but left the rest up to her. It was like Christmas the day I picked it up!  lol 

Got the binding on pretty quick and washed the quilt, but there was still a lot of work left, because I wanted embellishments on this one. I hand stitched little shells all around the compass. Each one is triple-stitched and knotted individually, just in case. 

The turquoise ropes are bordered by a shell trim and striped ribbon – which I washed and dried on the rack in my dryer 3 separate times because I knew the twill tape would shrink quite a bit and much differently than the ribbon. Then I carefully sewed the trims on.

And THEN I decided I had to hand-stitch each individual dangly into position so that when the quilt is hanging, gravity wouldn’t pull them out of position.

I got to watch quite a few movies over several evenings to get “Sailing” finised!  But, oh, how I love her!