Love Quilt Progress

Although I haven't been busting out the quilts double time like I thought, I have been making some good progress on my Love Quilt. This is a very special quilt which I am giving as a very special gift. This as a gift to the woman who will be performing our wedding ceremony. That's right, the official announcement: We are getting married on September 2, 2010 (in just a few weeks!) at Burning Man. Burning Man is a week-long festival that happens annually in the desert about 100 miles north of Reno, NV. Our officiant, Reverend LaLa, will perform our ceremony for free as our gift and our gift to her will be this Love Quilt. I'm also making one to keep for ourselves, although at a much slower pace.


Me and a friend keeping warm at Burning Man, a few years ago.

Since moving to Sacramento almost two months ago I've also gotten in touch with some local quilters through Meetup.com (try it, I love meeting people this way!). Nancy invited the group to her house for some Saturday morning quilting. She has an amazing house, with tons of room to baste a quilt on her tile floor! That's what I spent half the time doing (pin basting, which I'm starting to rethink since everyone was looking at me like I was nuts).



I spent the other half of the time using a stencil Nancy lent me (my first time using a stencil) to make chalk marks on my quilt and then quickly quilting it on my Bernina. I really didn't like using the chalk, since it came off almost as fast as I put it on. There are a few places where I had to free-hand the design because the chalk had already rubbed off. Since I was borrowing the stencil, I tried to quilt as fast as possible. It was Super Speedy Quilting.

I'm using King Tut thread in Red, so it's a bit hard to photograph the quilting. The stencil I used has a circle of six hearts. Most of the stencil fits on the block, though it does extend a bit into the sashing. I looked for more stencils to use on the border, but couldn't find the perfect one, so I played around with a few ideas until I found the perfect idea! My cursive is very pretty, so I wrote in cursive around the border. I wrote words like Love, Thank You, Kiss, Burning Man, Burn Baby Burn, Two Hearts One Love, Forever and Ever, and of course, Thank You Reverend LaLa. In between the phrases, I free-handed a heart. The heart acts as a separator between the phrases and also a great connector to keep it continuous line quilting. It turned out beautiful!

Oops, except for one thing. I accidentally quilted a bit of the backing into the quilt.



I cut it away a bit, but I'm kinda stuck now. I'm pretty sure the only way to fix this is to pick out the quilting stitches and then redo that part. If there are any other ideas, I'd love to hear them. Just another silly mistake in my quilting adventure. Did you check out my backing fabric? It's so perfect! It's pink and red so it matches the front. And the red lines of the fabric totally hide my beginning quilting. I love it! That was definitely dumb luck! Sometimes dumb luck works against you, sometimes it works for you!