It's been cooling off a bit this week (finally!) and that means I can get back to some quilting! I've had a few quilts in assorted states of non-completion due to hand-quilting. I thought I'd chatter a bit about hand-quilting and how I do it, when I do it, and all that jazz.
I hand-quilted all of my quilts for a few years, simply due to the logistics of having to cram an entire queen-sized quilt into my wee machine and definitely wanting to work from the center out. In my thinking about it, I was pretty convinced that the maneuvering of a large quilt in the machine would take me about the same time to quilt as it would take to work it up by hand. I've since learned that this is not true, and I've become quite comfortable with machine-quilting. But every once in a while a quilt demands hand-quilting!
Right now I'm working my way through this Retro Flowers quilt. I'm working 2 lines of quilting within each petal of the flower (I can go back in and do another round if I think it needs it). I knew that I wanted to quilt this within each petal, and I machine-quilted 2 petals and did not like it one bit! The curve of the petals is a bit too tight to be able to comfortably manipulate the entire quilt through. I ripped that stitching out (...before getting a picture, sorry!) and decided that hand-quilting would be the best way to go.
I tend to do any hand-quilting using 2 strands of DMC floss rather than traditional quilting thread. I also work the stitches to be a bit longer. I figure if I'm going to go to the trouble of hand-quilting the whole thing, I want it to show, to be a design element. I also find that it lends itself to a stronger motif on the back of the quilt:
For some quilts, the decision to hand-quilt is largely a logistical issue. I've decided to hand-quilt the Vortex Quilt because the quilt is IMMENSE - it's ~80" square. I also thought it might be a bit of a beast to run through the machine, as there are many many many tight seams piled up very close together toward the center. Due to the size of this quilt and the overwhelming task of hand-quilting it, I've had the help of some friends! It's getting quilted up bee-style, with each person working on a different portion of the quilt. While this leads to a bit of unevenness in the stitching, I'm not too concerned - I think the quilt is large enough and things are distributed enough that it won't matter in the end. (Also, it will be DONE!)
This simple Crosses Quilt also received the hand-quilt treatment:
Again, I think this was a decision based on size. I find that I am also more prone to hand-quilt if the quilt-top can be broken down into a base shape - squares, circles, petals. That way I can gauge my progress a bit more, and I can set "goals" for myself when I'm working on it (...only 2 more squares...) For this green quilt, I treated the large empty squares with diagonal stitches of tangerine and mimicked the lines of the pieced blocks in white and green. That was all to make the back nicer:
I also love how the hand-quilting feels in the completed quilt - it really puckers it up nicely.
This embroidered bird quilt got it too:
Again, largely due to the size of the quilt. But also due to the bird images - any all-over pattern would interfere with the embroidery. And the combination of embroidery with machine-quilting on this Did. Not. Work. If I recall, I may have also been of the twisted mind "Hey, I've already put 600 hours of work into this, what's another 20?" It was definitely the right thing to do in this case.
So, that's how I feel about hand-quilting and why I do it sometimes. Stock up on DMC, get your needles and thimbles, and get to it! It's quite satisfying.
While I was there, I chatted to her a bit about her quilts, and managed to get some pictures of her 3 most prized quilts, which are the main features of 2 bedrooms in her home.
This first one is made from 2" hexes. Connie collected fabrics from all of her neighbors and students and parents and all the people in her life at the time, and made this fantastic traditional flower hex quilt. She said she enjoyed working on the hex quilts while her kids were young due to how easy it was it was to take along with her. The quilting itself took longer than the top - she couldn't take it with her, and had to work on it in spurts here and there. But she got it done!
Connie decided to take the hexes a step further - this next quilt is constructed of hexes that end up being 1/2" once sewn. She says this is the smallest reasonable (HA!) size to work with and still have shape and pattern recognition in the finished quilt. This quilt is BANANAS. Due to the excess material behind each hex piece, the finished quilt has a slightly puffed-hex feel to it.
She opted to maintain the hexagonal edges on this one. The finished piece is about 40" x 30".
I got the impression from Connie that the quilt she is most proud of is her Bicentennial Quilt. It's a red-white-and-blue hex quilt that is chock full of fussy-cuts.
In talking with her, she mentioned that many bicentennial quilts were constructed to include parts of ancestral centennial quilts that were never completed! Connie didn't have any of those on hand, but she also did not want to leave her children with an unfinished quilt. She opted to have the hand-quilting done by someone else, but maintained the traditional quilting patterns.
She also "signed" it in 2 corners, with fussy cuts of her name.
Connie's asked me to help her sign the back of these quilts by embroidering her signature on the back of each. Hooray! It will be great to get a better feel of how they're made.
More Connie chronicles to come - she claims to have some unfinished quilt pieces to pass on to me, and I'm sure to be inspired by this bundle of books!
