First of all I will apologize for the terrible quality of the pictures. These are pictures I took on my phone throughout this quilting project to send to my mom and sisters. Also, my decent camera was damaged on a recent trip, so I'm pretty much relegated to phone pictures until I replace that. So thank you for your understanding! Saying all of that, I feel too excited about completing this that I don't care that the pictures are terrible. I just want to share anyways!
After we got engaged, I decided to make a quilt for Joe and me to use on our bed. I found this Single Irish Chain quilt in the June 2012 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting. The quilt is called Canyon Trail and can be found on page 90. I picked out these colors because I love the teal and brown look, and I liked how this also had some complexity with the sage greens and creams. After many many hours of cutting, piecing and sewing, I got to the stage of having the top completed as you can see in this picture.
The quilt top just finished and laid out for a little photo session
I have always machine quilted my previous quilts, but I've never done anything this large or honestly this neatly. I didn't want to screw it up, so I bit the bullet and had it professionally quilted this summer on a long-arm quilting machine by a lovely lady named Phyllis Domeier. She lives in New Ulm, MN. I took the quilt with me to New Ulm on a visit in July to my parents' house. I know I could have had it done locally, but she did it for about half the price and did a fantastic job!
After I got it back from her in September I still had to sew on the binding. To do that, first I sewed the binding onto the front side, and then I had to hand stitch the binding around the edge of the quilt and onto the backing. I finished the last stitch just last night. It was a lot of hand stitching, but I did get distracted making a lot of other projects. Also, we can't actually use this quilt yet until we move, so I didn't have that pressure to get it done. I'm super excited to announce though that last night I put in the final stitch on the binding! It's done!!! Joe and I will be moving to Dayton, Ohio in the near future (date TBD), so it will be fantastic to put this on the bed. However, I have further plans for the bedroom.
Downtown LA has wonderful fabric shops. The last time I was down there I decided to take the quilt along and look for fabric for the curtains. I found a beautiful striped silk with a nice silk solid to make a contrasting panel for some full length panel curtains. That morning before I went shopping I also found this awesome DIY tufted headboard tutorial from Thrift Decor Chick.
It inspired the purchase of some great brown linen to try my hand at making my own headboard. You can see the fabrics below. I put the quilt on the bed, laid the curtain fabric on that and then draped the headboard fabric over our current headboard to see how it all looked. I'm looking forward to sharing a more completed look in the future. For now, you'll just have to imagine the possibilities with me.
Curtain and headboard fabric
Finally, here is the picture that I took literally right after I stood up from the couch and threw the quilt onto it in my excitement!
