Monday, June 20, 2011

Castle Quilt Completed!

I finished the castle quilt!  Yay!!!!!!!!  I'm very glad it's done.  I really ran out of steam near the end and was just sort of racing to finish it.  That may have resulted in a reduction of quality control, but that's OK. It was still a good project, and I noticed that my blocks are much more lined up than in the past!  So I must be improving or learning or something.  Me learn good.

Front view (see how most many some of the blocks line up!):


Back view (you can sort of see the diagonal quilting):



I'm happy it is done, but there are two things that I'm not totally happy with.

The first one is the actual quilting.  I'm still only quilting in straight lines, but I wanted to do something a little different, so I sketched out this pattern:



Once I had a pattern, I used painter's tape (the blue stuff) to mark my lines.  Although the quilt turned out to be slightly smaller than twin size, it was still the biggest one I've made.  As such, I found it very difficult to do the actual quilting -- there was so much material all over that it was hard to contain it and keep it smoothed out.  I had a lot of problems with the fabric between the last few of each quadrant of the quilted lines bunching up.  Luckily, however, once I washed the quilt and the fabric squished up, the bunches became less obvious.

I'm also not happy with the binding.  I usually machine sew the binding onto the front of the quilt, then fold it over and hand sew it to the back.  This time, I pinned the binding directly into place on the quilt and sewed it on through the front and the back.  I don't think it looks so good:


So in the future I'm going to go back to doing it the old way.  This was was much quicker for sure -- but the results are a little less cute.

I'll also have you know that I made a matching pillow using the leftover fabrics!  The pillow insert came from Ikea - it is the 16 x 24 size which is slightly smaller than a standard pillow.



The good news is that even though I am not 100% happy with this quilt, my son just loves it!  He was using it to watch TV:


And now it's on his bed as a summer-weight blanket (those Star Wars decals are lookin' gooooood):


So, all things considered, I think this project was a success!!!!!!!!!!!!

1 comment:

  1. I'm impressed - looks great! I can't wait to see what's up next!

    ReplyDelete