shimmering strings

shimmeringstrings

This quilt was mostly finished the day I found out that Lake Champlain had completely frozen over, and I decided that mostly finished would have to be good enough.

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If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I love it when the lake freezes over, despite that it means we’ve had a really cold winter. It froze last year, which was the first time in seven years, and I took this Lizzy House quilt out there for photos.

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This year there was  less black ice and more snow, which isn’t quite as cool (my sister laughs and says that we could be in a snow covered field anywhere, but trust me, the lake is under there!). I know it’s not for everyone – Morgan won’t join me out there – but I think it’s pretty novel.

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Anyway, the quilt! It’s made up of a great upcoming line from Windham Fabrics called Artisan Cotton. They’re cross weaves, which I always love. Half the colors are woven with two different colors to create the color you see and the other half are woven with the color and white to create a chambray look. I paired then with some fun Yuwa prints that have been in my stash to create a quilt along the lines of one I saw in Roderick Kiracofe’s book,  Unconventional & Unexpected.

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I love the mix of solids and prints, and I especially love these little extras, like that light blue strip above. I often add something like that to my quilts on purpose because I love the look, though this time I really did cut incorrectly and had to add it to get the block up to size!

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I made it a challenge to use up all the extra bits, so I saved all the trimmings from the blocks and put them together to create these extra little blocks for the backing. The solid is Robert Kaufman’s Essex yarn dyed in olive, which paired nicely with these solids.

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I quilted it with straight lines – which proved to be a bit of a challenge. I did have to unpick several lines of quilting when I found that my pinning job wasn’t up to par. With all those seams, these blocks tend to be kind of stretchy, so I went back and used the spray adhesive and pins.

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The thread is a variegated yellow/green and seemed a good match for all these colors. I finished it off with a binding in one of the blues, and you’ll have to trust me that it was a good choice!

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p.s. thanks for all the love on my bespoke quilt top! I love that it can look entirely different each time the blocks are put together, so I thought I’d provide a few measurements in case you wanted to give it a try! Look for that in the next day or two…

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