Gathering Blooms BOM Quilt

It’s almost a year since I wrote this post about the new Gathering Blooms Block of the Month I had designed for Today’s Quilter magazine. Well here is the finished quilt!

I’ve really enjoyed making these blocks every month, they are a lovely mix of piecing and needle-turn applique and of course I got to indulge my love of flowers and leaves.

Unusually for me I planned the whole thing in advance, including the fabrics, which meant it was really stress free. I really should remember how good this approach is for the future!!

I tried to plan the flowers so that as each issue of the magazine was published the featured flower would be blooming in our gardens and fields. I think I got this right every month, at least for my garden up here in Scotland.

However there was one major hiccup towards the end of the project and quilters of a sensitive nature may want to take a seat (or a stiff drink!) before reading this next bit…

I completed both month 11 (black eyed susan vine) and month 12 (echinacea) at the same time as I was keen to get them to the magazine for photography so that they could return the blocks to me as soon as possible. This would give me longer to finish the actual quilting. Every month I sent my blocks off with Royal Mail in a polythene bag inside a large sturdy cardboard envelope (along with a hard copy of the pattern) with the ‘signed for’ service.

But something went terribly wrong with this last mailing. It reached the destination but the envelope was shredded and the blocks were completely missing!!!

When the editor told me I felt physically sick because I knew right away that I would need to remake both blocks.  There was simply no way around it as I needed the blocks to finish the quilt.

I did get some compensation from Royal Mail but not nearly enough to make up for the extra hours I had to spend hand stitching all those flowers and leaves again, and in double quick time!!

I would have loved enough time to have hand quilted this one as it really is a beautiful heirloom quilt. But my schedule was just too full in the summer so instead I created a grid of double lines on my Moxie long arm and used Aurifil 40/3 thread in my favourite shade 2000. But I left a space between the horizontal grid lines to fill with hand quilting afterwards.

This was the first quilt I finished on the Handi Quilter Moxie since I moved it into my Schoolhouse Studio. It’s a real pleasure to quilt on the longarm in here, there are wonderful views and the floor is really level!

I used a light aqua shade of Aurifil 12wt cotton for the big stitch hand quilting. It’s a small detail but I think it adds something special to the finished quilt. The wadding is the 80/20 mix from Vliesiline which is my current favourite batting.

You will see above in this extreme close up that my stitches are really not that even, but that’s okay, I really think hand quilting should show something of the ‘human hand’ and not strive too much for perfection.

It’s been so lovely to see other versions of these blocks cropping up in my feed and shared with me in other ways. I few members of our Thread House Academy are making the quilt and so blocks crop up regularly in our Zoom ‘show and tells’. And my sister Jane has also been making the BOM blocks and shares her beautiful versions through our WhatsApp chat.

I therefore look forward to seeing many more finished Gathering Blooms quilts soon!