Girt By Sea – FINISHED!!

Wow…. this has been an epic quilt! I was so happy when I finished the quilt top near the end of 2018….(having started it in April 2017! To see the previous posts about it click here.) I had big plans to quilt it early in 2019… but that just didn’t happen.

Lily the longarm was new to me and I wanted to do this quilt justice… not just an all over design, but some decent custom free motion quilting.

And I just wasn’t ready to do that in early 2019. And then I got REALLY busy quilting for other people!

So, finally, over this Xmas break I pulled up those big girl panties and loaded her up onto Lily.

I still couldn’t decide what I was going to do in each of the sections. Then I just realised I just needed to START! I wasn’t going to be able to work out every tiny little detail before I started….. if I tried I would NEVER start. So in I went!

The one thing I had decided on was that I didn’t want it quilted to death. This is a quilt that will go on our bed. It will be used and snuggled under. So when I was in doubt, I erred on the side of less quilting.

I got out my trusty 50wt Aurifil Threads (in ALL the gorgeous colours!) to find the best matches for each of the areas of the quilt.

The centre design I did decide on before I started… as this is such a focal point of the quilt I wanted to get it right. Some dot to dot ruler work and a few of Angela Walter’s wavy triangles. And I fell in love with the Alison Glass fabrics all over again.

The next round of the girt by sea medallion were the Windmills…. so I did a swirly pattern called Wind.

The next row of the medallion was supposed to be needleturn applique circles to represent grapes… but I couldn’t face any more handsewing (the EPP centre had broken me!) so I pieced hearts instead. And my husband suggested quilting little hearts in there too.

The next two rounds of the medallion represented our mountains and our waves…. I finally decided on some ruler work on the mountains and I went a bit ‘out there’ and did a representation of a boomerang with pebbles in the middle above the mountains.

And when I started quilting the waves I was in the very citrus colours, so I thought they actually looked like wedges of an orange… so wedges it was!

The final border on the Girt By Sea was the friendship braid. I kept this very simple in the quilting with just some arcs along the various lines.

So that is a lot of the detail….. and here is the full quilt all quilted and bound (in a rainbow scrappy binding of course!) and on our guest bed.

Oh and this was a fun pic I took of my Binding Betty helping me with the binding

As you might have guessed by all the photos, I love this quilt. It was a looooong process. But wow, that finished quilt is a stunner. Can’t wait for winter so I can have an excuse for some quality time underneath it looking at all the details all over again.

Hehe… I found some more pictures! The backing is the stunning mermaid print from Alison Glass Diving Board. I had been keeping this fabric for a special quilt and this one is definitely that!

And the Quilt Barn needed to be in a picture …. with a John Deere on a lovely summer’s evening….

And the final picture…..

Wow that is one gorgeous looking quilt!