Blogger's Quilt Festival - "25th, Baby!!"

Wow, am I excited!  I've finally finished stitching the binding down on my double wedding ring 25th anniversary quilt - barely in time for this fall's Blogger's Quilt Festival! [Amy, of Amy's Creative Side, has undoubtedly spent countless hours organizing and facilitating this show that has a spectacular list of sponsors, so I give her my heartfelt gratitude.]
This is being entered in the "Home Machine Quilted" Category.

"25th, Baby!!"

Check out those crazy points in the scallops - yes, they took a long time! In fact, everything about this quilt took a long time. (More on that later)

At finish, this king-size quilt measures 98" x 110" and weighs 12 pounds. It shrank about 6 inches each way with the heavy quilting.

This is Isabeau's most favorite quilt - She never misses an opportunity to lay on or in it!

I've been working on this baby since August 21, 2013. That's right. It's been the priority project for over a year! 

I was looking for the elegance of the curves that the traditional piecing for double wedding ring quilts achieves - with the round lines continuing through the connecting diamonds rather than having hard-edged diamonds splatted on top of the arcs as in the faster methods. So I used the Omnigrid cutting templates that I'd found at a "yard sale" however many years ago. 

To get a controlled scrappy effect, I used some fabrics from my stash, mixed with a bunch of new fat quarters, for the arcs. The background, backing, and diamond yardages were purchased new for this quilt. The batting is Hobb's Tuscany Washable Wool, one layer. I would have loved to put a layer of 80/20 cotton underneath for even better faux trapunto results, but that would have been way too heavy for me to move around while free-motion quilting. I work at a table-top machine, so weight can become a serious issue at this size!

[Several months ago I made a TIPS post about piecing traditional DWRs so I could remember strategies that helped and share everything that I found useful.]

I just love how the quilting came out on this!

The central quilting design is "Megan's Feathers" by Donna Kleinke. I bought the digital file, then printed it out so I could make Golden Threads patterns to pin onto my ring centers to quilt through (I had already stitched in the ditch on everything to stabilize the quilt. In the future, I'd find it less work to trace the design onto the top before sandwiching everything.) I made my own motifs for the melon portions and the diamonds. 

[I also made a TIPS post about quilting a king size on a table-top machine.]

We were married on August 23, 1989 in Manti, Utah

25 years later, we are a little heavier, a lot wiser, and still building a life together! 

I wanted to personalize the quilting on our quilt, so in the center I made an anniversary tribute area:

The very middle is a "C" monogram with a floral fill, 

and there's an "L" and an "S" to either side:

 

There is a 1989 spot,

and a 25th spot:

I had trouble figuring out how I wanted to "fence" this grouping off from the overall quilting, and ended up doing a ropy "border" that filled the oddball corners with these hearts and the background lines.

I used a 50-wt thread on the pink sections, and 100-wt silks on the diamonds, all matching. I had left the arcs unquilted other than the ditch work, because I wanted them to stand out dimensionally. But I saw that it had some collapsing going on when the quilt wasn't perfectly flat, so with the walking foot I put in a wavy stitch that my machine has, using a beigy-green thread that I had on hand.

It was the perfect touch - stabilizing the arcs in a gorgeous way that allowed the puff to stay tall without distracting from the quilting designs in the backgrounds.

The back is just as gorgeous as the front! 
What a pretty whole-cloth effect:

So now we can finally put this on our bed - It's so nice to have a second king size quilt, just in time for it to snow in a couple of nights! No more drafts sneaking in because the queen sizes let leaks through on the sides when we want to stack more than one on top of us!

I did keep track of the time that everything took as I went along, because I knew it was going to be the most monumental quilt I'd ever made. All on a table-top domestic machine, too!

Cutting:  39:10

Piecing:  122:15
Pin-basting:  7:30

Quilting-
  Stitch in Ditch:  22:05
  Detail Work:  103:45
  Arcs:  10:00

Attaching Binding:  6:10 (includes hand cutting the edge and zig-zagging for stability)
Finish Work (cleaning papers off, tying & tucking ends):  62:05

Handstitching Binding down:  18:35

Before any family or friends ask me if I'll make them one of these, let me say that between the intensity of the work involved and the immense amount of calendar time it took, I will never do it for less than fair pay for my hours. At my current skill levels, I'd charge $35/hr for cutting and piecing, and $25/hr for the quilting. For the finishing work and the hand stitching time on the binding, I'd go down to $15/hr, because I do play a movie in the background while that's happening (although I only hear it rather than actually watching). So that makes this quilt worth $9,717.30!!

If I were a lawyer, mind you, it would be at least $175,346.25!!!!

Nobody I know can (or would) pay that kind of money for a quilt, so I can rest peacefully, knowing I don't need to make another one.  ;D

h! Voting is HERE during Nov 1-7 at the Quilt Festival for this category