Seaside Stitches: The One Year Quilt

You've all seen the meme: How long does it take to finish a quilt you're not working on? For this quilt, the answer is one year! Actual working time? Three or four days. It was a coincidence, really, that I completed it exactly one year after it was started.

At our retreat last year, Julia and I made these jelly roll race tops.

The workshop included instruction on adding piece-lique circles. It was Julia's idea that our circles should make a heart when our quilts are together. Since we wanted to work on this project together, and last summer flew by, we buckled down and applied the circles during Christmas break. OK, I may have leaned on her pretty hard to carve out the time for this.

Not wanting to wait any longer, I quilted mine yesterday. Just before midnight, I took the final stitches on the binding. I'm happy that I'll have it for show & tell this weekend.

My quilting plan revolves around my dislike for marking and burying threads. I quilted organic wavy lines across the rows with my walking foot. When I ran into a circle, I just wrapped around it and continued on.

I did want to do something fun in the circles, which required burying threads. It couldn't be avoided. To make the flower shape, I divided the circle in 8ths with a hera marker. No pen or pencil lines to wash out is almost as good as no marking at all.

For the back, I wanted to use more batiks, but I had previously chopped up my entire batik stash into 9" squares for future Anita's Arrowhead blocks. I pulled all the colors that coordinated with my top and started piecing. In no time at all, I had a pieced back that really made this a two-sided quilt. I used the same blues and greens from the circles to piece together the binding.