Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Finished: "Batik Boxes"


There has been relatively little actual quilting going on lately, but the annual Thanksgiving family-chatter-and-handwork downtime let me finish off one that was threatening to become a perenial UFO. It's called Batik Boxes, and it's one that I also bought the material for and designed (in that order) on a Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving 2004, it says here in my notes. It was maybe 20% quilted at the beginning of this quilting season, so in the scheme of things it came together fairly quickly.

I've long thought of this one as a bit of an ugly duckling, so I was surprised to get quite a few family complements on it. But then, they're family! What are they going to say?

I had intended to do a dense stippled quilting of the orangish fabric, but recently abandoned that idea as more work than the quilt was worth. However, I will say that the workmanship is not at all bad, by my standards. It's likely the last piece I'll quilt "in the ditch" for a while -- I've found I much prefer quilting "near the ditch" -- but I was pleased by how consistently I was able to keep most of the stitches actually in the ditch, without slowing to a crawl.
[The back, with a book on it so that the camera could figure out how to focus.]

The pieceing, which happened a few years ago, was certainly easy. It was just a matter of cutting the two fabrics into two-inch wide strips, sewing the strips together in pairs, cutting lengths in increments of 3 inches + seam allowances, and sewing them back together like so to make the blocks:



The only tricky part was making sure to make the same number of blue-centered and orange-centered blocks.

(illustration made with my favorite quilt design software, Microsoft Excel)

6 comments:

Vicki W said...

I think the quilt looks great - congrats on the finish!

jovaliquilts said...

Hey, I'll have to play around with Excel -- never thought of it for quilt design! I like the quilt, but that style always has different sections advancing and receding, at least in photos, which drives me a little nuts.I like the fabric combination.

Debra Dixon said...

I like the Pop factor to this pattern! Nice finish.

Libby said...

Wow, nice easy pattern. Not sure why it wouldn't have occurred to me to do it that way (??) Glad you had a chance to work on something...it's been entirely too quiet around here.

gl. said...

i like it! it feels lively. congratulations!

Kristen said...

I just found your blog. I'm a quilter also and love seeing quilts others have done.
Can't wait to see more of your work.