Jane's Border Creek Station Mystery Quilt

I finished Jane's Border Creek Station mystery quilt late last night and I'm so very pleased with the outcome!  I was a little nervous with the density of those pebbles but I think with the striped/piano key border quilting it turned out very even.  I love the texture this gives - Jane sent her own Tuscany Wool batting and it always quilts up beautifully.

The back is so pretty - almost a whole cloth in itself!  I really love neutral backings that show off the pretty quilting...they also show off the mistakes too...but let's just pretend I live in a world where I never ever EVER make those!  :)

Above is the full view photo that Jane sent me - along with a bare bones mock up I sent her.  I had an idea of what I wanted to do - and I wanted to get her opinion on pebbling before I went through and drew pebbles all over this quilt!  Luckily she is a gal who enjoys pretty pebbles just like me!

I did one border with this flourish so that it looks as if the quilting is traveling out and around and framing the quilt from this one point.  I really love it!

I used darn near a full 3,000 yard cone of Bottom Line thread on this quilt - fresh and new from the package!  There might be enough left on the cone now to fill two or three bobbins...those pebbles take up a lot of thread.  

I'm so happy with the way this one turned out.  I've got the feather itch now though - and good thing too as the next quilt is going to be full of them!

Almost at the Half Way Point

I am almost at the half way point on this quilt - OH MY GOODNESS!!  I cannot wait to be finished.  I have half a dozen more ideas floating in my head and I have quilts coming in soon!!!  Tomorrow is our second Christmas with my Husbands family...a day of play...then after that I have to buckle down because that only gives me one more week to finish the quilting on this.

I have been getting a lot of questions about what batting or what thread I'm using.  This is Glide thread on the top and in the bobbin - the cream fabric is mainley natural muslin - meaning there are natural imperfections in the fabric.  I like the look personally - and I like even more the idea of an elegant design over what is normally thought of as an inexpensive utilitarian fabric.  I love love love Glide thread because it tends to quilt up somewhere between a very fine thread and a thicker polyester thread...it's perfect for sort of, all purpose quilting.  You can do a lot of dense quilting without a terrible amount of thread build up or you can do really simple designs and they look very elegant and fancy with Glide's bit of shine.  I wind my own bobbins and have yet to use the magna bobbins but I hear great things about them!  I also like that Glide comes off the cone really smoothly.  I have only had one cone out of the forty or more that I've purchased from them that I had to use a thread net over.  (The price is right too - and they have one all across the board price...so I pay the same for the thread as you!  I am not affiliated - just a fan!)

I am using two layers of batting - and I prefer two layers of a lower loft batting to one layer of high loft batting.  It just gives a better more fuller look in my opinion.  Dare I say I even like the look of a "faux" trapunto look with two layers of batting and dense quilting versus real machine trapunto over top another layer or two layers of batt.  Or maybe I'm just lazy and would rather quilt the crumbs out of my quilt instead of cut away batting...  LOL!  :)

The top batting is Hobbs Tuscany Wool - I have never used this brand of wool before this quilt and I have never made a quilt this size with wool, but I do like Hobbs 80/20 quite a lot and they are very consistent so I thought it would be a good wool to start with.  I do love the fullness and the loft...but I don't like the memory retention and the sort of looseness of the batting.  When on the frame I like to poke the sides of my quilt where there is no top with pins while I am adjusting things and wool doesn't make a very good pincusion!  :)

The bottom layer is an off brand equivalent to Warm and Natural.  I have no real strong feelings about Warm and Natural either way other than to say that Warm and White tends to beard and beard bright white through my fabric so I rarely if ever use it anymore.  I honestly don't care for cotton either because I'm a machine quilter - I feel like poly and poly blends show off the quilting better and I like even more that poly batts tend to retain fold lines less.  I do however really like the look of these two batts together (wool and cotton) - though in the future to get more bang on the back I will probably layer wool with Hobbs 80/20.  Hobbs and Quilter's Dream have been my two favorite battings so far...and both are pretty economically priced.

Alright, happy sewing!  Hopefully I'll be DONE next time you hear from me!!!  :)