It Really is a Wonder!!!

I promised to show you pictures today of a UFO from last year that I finally got quilted – thanks once again to my friend Joanne who allowed me to use her wonderful Gammill =^..^=

This is one of my favorite quilts …--- my One Block Wonder!

One of my earliest mentors when I first began quilting, Sue Pulling, taught this as a two-day class when Music City had its retreat in March of last year.  Sue came all the way from Michigan to join the retreat with her old friends and teach the class.  And what a class it was!!!  Sue is really, really good at what she does, and teaching is her specialty.  We had so much fun with this technique!

For those of you who are not familiar with this quilt design, it comes from the this book by Maxine Rosenthal.  

The basic technique is to choose a lively fabric with a fairly large design that contains at least 3 colors, making sure you have enough fabric to cover 6 repeats of the design run.  This was my fabric….

You layer the fabric so that six repeats of the design lay one on top of the other perfectly, cut it in strips, then in 60 degree triangles.  Then you sew the triangles back together to form a hexagon kaleidoscope!  It was a blast seeing each of these lovely hexies come to shape right before my eyes!

It was even more fun doing it as a class because we got to see what the others’ fabrics were producing too.  I wish I had pictures of them to share, but I wasn’t blogging back then and didn’t think to take pics.  One girl did hers in an African animal theme and it produced some amazing hexies!  Others chose orientals which worked out just beautifully!  Joanne (of the-friend-with-the-Gammill fame) chose a really lively and colorful fall fabric that turned out some of the most original and exciting designs of them all!

Because my fabric is so bright and the colors are not your ordinary run-of-the-mill, I had a hard time choosing the inner border.  I had a pink that went okay, and I also had a really nice lettuce green that worked perfectly. 

But both of them disappeared in the corners where they came next to the same colors in the quilt.  And I felt they were kind of blah for such a lively quilt.  Finally, just on a lark I picked this stripe out of my stash just to see how it would look – 

Eureka!!! 

But it needed something to stop the design between the stripe and the fabrics, so I put in a ¼” pink flange on both sides.

I really LOVE that look....

However that love did NOT extend to the quilting!  It was quite frankly a B**** to quilt because of those little flanges!  I wanted to do an allover panto because the quilt itself was so busy the quilting would have disappeared anyway. But in order to do the panto, I had to pin down all the flanges and stop/start at each one, tie threads off, take great care not to sew over onto the flange…. None of this is easy on a longarm!  I am really happy with the result, but I would only ever do it again for a special quilt like this one!

For the binding, I decided I needed to use the stripe again, but not on a bias as I usually do for stripes because that just didn’t work at all.  And once again, it needed that little bit of pink to corral the two different designs between the quilt and the stripe.  I chose to do a small 1/8” flange under the binding which I think works out perfectly!

 

It’s double the work, and a little tricky working the corners out because of all the bulk...

.... but the effect is well worth it, don’t you think?

So that’s my TaDa!!! For the day!!!  

Hope you enjoyed seeing my One Block Wonder come alive!  I’ll be teaching a class on this at The Quilter’s Path in Mt. Juliet this summer, so check at the shop for times if you are local and would like to make this quilt =^..^=

Hugs & Blessings,

Teresa

=^..^=

FYI - Check out the cool giveaway going on over HERE at Lily Pad Quilting!

And then go see what others are doing where I'm linking up this post:

Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? at Confessions of a Fabric Addict

Link a Finish Friday at Richard and Tanya Quilts

June Finishes at Such a Sew & Sew
Tuesday Linky Party at Quilting by the River
Fabric Tuesday at Quilt Story