Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Liberty Quilt


This quilt has been done for a few weeks now but things have been busy around here guys!!  I had a good part of this quilt completed before I had Hazel, but I swore I wouldn't pin baste another quilt while pregnant after working on Chirch's quilt a few months back so I was waiting until after the baby was born to finish this puppy up.

I made this one for me, all ME!  It's made out of amazing Liberty of London fabric with Essex linen and I just love it.  The pictures here don't quite do it justice.  It's really bright and fun and it's currently living on our bed.  It's technically not quite big enough for a queen size, not quite wide enough, but I wanted this quilt to live on the couch in the winter and on our bed in the summer and I find that true queen sized quilts are just too large for couch snuggling.



Liberty of London fabric is very expensive so I started collecting for this quilt over a year ago and joined a fat eight fabric club.  Each month I'd receive a small amount of fabric and slowly over the course of a year or so I collected enough to make this quilt.  I've even got some left over to sprinkle throughout my next quilting projects and I'm so excited to see where these fabrics end up.  This quilt features over 100 Liberty patterns and is simply beautiful in person.


The back is also Liberty which I scored on super sale a few months back.  Four continuous yards of Liberty would cost over $150 but I scored it at over 60% off and snapped it up as soon as I saw the sale.  Liberty has a silky feel to it and find that it slides a bit on our bed because of it...but who cares...it's ever so soft.


It's 60 x 68 and made up of 16 patch blocks that I string pieced.  Each block is 2 inches finished and I quilted it in the ditch using a 2 x 2 grid.  I'm pretty happy with how the straight line quilting came out but I'm having issues with it pulling.  You can sort of see it in the larger picture above towards the lower left hand side.  The squares are a little pulled out of wack.  I've done straight line before and haven't had this problem before.

So quilty friends - what's my issue?  How can if fix it.  I'm seeing pulling in whichever direction I sewed...but I was super careful to make sure the fabric wasn't hanging or tugging when going through the machine.  I quilted this on my dining room table to make sure I had the support of the quilt as I went.  I'm wondering if it was more of the combination of fabric types...the Liberty is so soft and silky and the Essex is a little "rougher".  Thoughts?  I'd love some suggestions on how to avoid this in the future.