October OMG - One bite at a time

How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  That's a pretty good description of how this quilt is going.  Its been a long time since I started the Love Entwined quilt.  I thought it was two years ago but when I look back it was 2013.  I found the pattern when Esther was first releasing it as a free BOM.  I've changed my mind several times about how much I will do but at the moment I'm just doing the centre block. The quilt has had long periods of idle time.

Back in 2013, one of the first steps was the tiny circles around the compass.  They seemed very intimidating at the time and I tried several ways of prepping them before going back to my favorite trace the shape and needle turn.  As documented here, they weren't so scary after all.  More little circles appeared on another shape in the centre and I took this photo during the preparation to show the size of them.  



One of the next things that looked really intimidating was the zig zag border which I finally prepared last month and am appliquing this month.  It is turning out to not be so scary after all as well.  I spent a lot of time debating appliquing the pieces individually or stitching them together and treating as one long border.  In the end, I choose to piece the segments together.  I printed the shapes from the pattern onto an fusible applique sheet and fused that to the back of my fabrics.  Cut the shapes out with seam allowance then stitched the pairs together just along the fusible, leaving the seam allowance unstitched.  Once all the pairs were together, they got sewn into fours or threes to make the seven in the sequence.  Two sevens and a five were stitched together to finish preparing the border.  The last two colours in the sequence will be added later as the two part pointer piece.   Since I'm appliquing these in place, this is one of those times I decided pressing the seam open would be a good idea.  It distributes the bulk across the two pieces instead of putting it all under one.  That would probably have made for some really interesting points.




I took the piece with the borders pinned in place to guild in October and actually stitched almost the whole top of one side of the border down during the course of the meeting.  Having the fusible on the back has been really nice to turn the fabric against.  With the seam allowance free at the ends, its been really easy to turn the corners and make the Vs on the inside of the border.  So here it is, with the border all stitched down and ready for four vases of flowers.  The black lines are basted stitching lines that marked the horizontal, vertical and diagonals.  Its been really nice to remove them as I go since they come out as I no longer need that guideline.


This was my One Monthly Goal for October at Heidi's OMG which I'm pleased to say I finished.  Also linking up with Esther's WOW

Comments

  1. It looks fantastic! Even though it seems intimidating once one relax and just start to appliqué it is fun. Love what you have done so far. LOL I am still busy with my centre and I started in 2014. I have given myself six years to get the top done. A reasonable time frame?....

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  2. MY! That's amazing! The pieces are so small, i'm aside myself. Love the colours you used too. Very beautiful. Congrats on accomplishing this tedious quilt. ;^)

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