A Looks for Less Quilt

I finished this quilt top in June, but it sat on the to-do pile until August when I eventually got round to basting it. It was another month until it was quilted and it was finished finally on Saturday, thanks to a day of burying the ends and stitching the binding at Leeds Modern Quilt Guild meeting.

I wanted to try making a quilt using something other than quilting cottons, but without breaking the bank. The quilt is a mixture of scrap packs of furnishing silk and some linen-look fabric and is backed and bound with factory shop seconds of Liberty lawn making it a case of luxury for less.

I prewashed the fabrics before cutting to make sure they were washable and used ½” seam allowances as the fabrics tended to fray and then quilted ¼” from the seams to stabilise the fabrics. I think the wadding is a Cloud Eco 70/30 recycled cotton/polyester blend, but I bought it over a year ago from Doughty’s at a show and I can’t remember the exact details. It has a nice degree of shrinkage which helps to hide some of the dodgy quilting. The linen-look fabric in particular could have done with being more heavily starched in preparation for the quilting (which was done using Aurifil 40 wt) as it had a tendency to creep resulting in puckers at the end of each rectangle.

I don’t normally label my quilts, but for this one I used my machine’s alphabet feature to add a label of sorts in one corner. I stitched this just through the backing and wadding and it is not very noticeable at all.

Spot the label!

Close up of the label.

Now I've made this quilt, it has not quite worked out as I had envisaged. I can't quite put my finger on what I don't like, but I'm more ambivalent over it rather than enthused by it. I wonder if it is the lack of contrast between the linen and the beige silk - perhaps I would like it more had I used only white silk. No doubt it will be a functional quilt, if not a fancy quilt, and will be welcomed as the evenings start to get chillier.