TGIFF Is Here This Week - What a Hoot, Marissa!

Hi! Welcome to this week's "Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday" link-up! Have you finished something lately that you'd like to share? Link up at the bottom of this post, and be sure to visit a few links to help your quilting peers celebrate their finishes.  :D

This is a super fun finish for our family. "What a Hoot, Marissa!" is the last in a series of three quilts made for our daughters as each of them graduated from high school!

This was my first original quilt design, and when I made the first one in 2010, it provided the basis for my blog's name as that was when I started recording my quilting endeavors here. The first two had one more row so they'd be a good length for the extra-long twin beds of college freshman dorms. This one fits Marissa's needs better in a regular length, and it's done to a 70 x 90 inch size. I *loved* the backing fabric I found for it!

Marissa chose her school colors for the checkerboards, and the owls were appliqued with satin stitching. I get the best result with this approach when I pin a layer of unprinted newsprint behind it to stabilize the fabric and keep puckers and ripples away. (I got a free "endroll" from a county newspaper a few years ago, which had yards and yards and yards of remnant.) It tears away so easily, it's no big deal at all to remove! I also clip away back layers to take away extra bulk and stiffness in the finished quilt.

Every so often, I get really picky about how I construct a quilt. On these, I adore the Celtic ribbon corners and didn't want the easier way of putting them together using HSTs as end-caps that would cut up the flow of the ribbons. So the fabric was cut in a way that uses a lot of Y seams and puzzle-piecing to put them together in a way that preserves the continuity of the ribbons. They look terrific in the finished product!

Another fun thing about these quilts is the button eyes that really liven the owls up. Yes, it takes a while to sew them all on. Not my favorite part, but definitely worth the effort.

The first two "What a Hoot" quilts were quilted by a guild co-member when we lived in Florida. This time around, I'm completely comfortable doing my own quilting, so this was completely finished by me. 

The inner field is quilted exactly the same as her sisters' had been done. But I didn't have the computerized system to easily measure out the Celtic style geometric design quilted in the wide border of the earlier versions, so I marked a spine all the way around and free-hand quilted feathers for that space.

Wow, am I happy with how those turned out!

Almost as happy as this remarkable young woman was to graduate.  :D  Love this huge grin of accomplishment!

Right now this fabulous quilt is hanging in our great room, where Marissa can bask in recognition all summer, and anyone who comes into the house can help us continue to celebrate. Soon she'll be starting her university studies, so I suppose we'll change it out. But for now, it makes me smile every day!

Oh yeah! And guess where half of the binding was stitched down? - In Hawaii! Specifically on a balcony on Waikiki, Oahu, and another balcony on Ka'anapali, Maui during sun breaks. Definitely worth lugging that heavy puppy in my carry-on from Colorado and back. . .   ;D

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Now it's your turn to toot your horn and let us help you celebrate a finish! Link up right here.  :) 

An InLinkz Link-up