Finished is better than custom quilted

Oh gosh -- my washer isn't working, and I needed to do laundry yesterday! It has been acting up recently: the door catch doesn't always recognize when the door is closed and locked. So if you wiggle the thing, it would work again. Yesterday? The wiggling didn't work. Oh well -- I have enough clothes to make the next couple of days work. 

When I'm back in three days, then I'll have time to try and get some things done around the house. Like weeding the backyard, fixing the washer, and giving the long arm a spa day. And so many more things!

Thankfully, the rest of July is pretty wide open, so I'm looking forward to that. 

I had forgotten to mention that there is no virtual retreat this month. I simply wasn't home enough to make it happen. And while I could let the retreat run without me, I would prefer not to do that. I am the host, and I don't like leaving the ladies unattended! Not that I don't trust them - I just prefer to be there when I have an open call. So there may be TWO retreats in July, as I have a lot of hand stitching and sewing that I can do, and why not? 

So I'm going to host a Virtual Retreat for July 4 and 5, and then I'll figure out the date for the second one. 

I have to leave shortly for my road trip, so I don't have much time to post, but I want to share my version of Color My World. We had an amazing show-and-tell of the Color My World quilts. I will sort through the pictures and post the quilt tops as they are finished. There are quite a few that are done, and many that are almost done; once people got into the process, many started customizing the four corners. I will post finished tops, but that won't happen until later this week.

 We went through the trials and tribulations of designing our corners with buildings that are meaningful to each of us, and wow - the participants went wild with that task. I am so darn proud of all of them for stepping out of the box and making this happen. 

This morning, I'll share my quilt with you.  

I decided to change two of the four corners, so I had the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, which were patterns included with the quilt. I switched out the Sydney Tower for the CN Tower, and the One World Center for a grain elevator. 

You can't have a grain elevator without identifying its location. This is the name of the tiny village near where I grew up. It shows up on Google Maps - seriously? I can't believe it - it's been a ghost town for quite some time, and there were two elevators in that village. Like almost all elevators in Saskatchewan, they are history. 

Machine embroidery on my grain elevator

Then came the decision of how to quilt the quilt. It is not typical of me to have one of our projects completely done by the end of the class, but I needed to take it to Quilt Canada with me. I thought long and hard about how to quilt it, and many of the ones spotted online were custom-quilted, with many lines of stitching in the ditch. 

You know how that is -- when I was a new quilter, 28 years ago, people used to say - just do "stitch in the ditch!" Well, I have since learned that stitch in the ditch is very time-consuming to do right, and it is NOT easy. I could have chosen to do it on the long arm or the domestic machine. It would have taken a long time to make it happen. Barbara Black said it took her six days to quilt the version she had done for The Quilt Show. 

I did NOT have six days, nor did I have any interest in all that stitch-in-the-ditch, so I decided that finished was more important than custom-quilted, and I loaded it on the long arm and did an edge-to-edge pattern with it. 

This is the pattern I chose. 

Edge-to-edge pattern on my Color My World quilt

And there it is, with an appropriate thread (color and weight), the thread and quilt design take second place to the houses. 

Color My World fresh off the long arm

If I remember correctly, that got quilted before I left for the wedding, and it got trimmed and bound on the "free" day I had between the wedding trip and Quilt Canada. 

I threw it in my suitcase, and when I arrived at the hotel, I had two quilts that I put out on the queen beds. 

Color My World on my bed in the hotel

I forgot how big the quilt is, but it fits beautifully over the top of a queen bed. I much prefer to make toppers for the beds rather than make a full-size quilt. Why? I don't need a full-sized quilt - a topper over the duvet works just fine for me. It takes less time to quilt, less fabric, less time to bind, and is smaller. Plus, big quilts just don't hang well on the corners of a bed, and there's the decision about what to do with the pillows. No more giant quilts for me.

As I lay in the other bed, I could admire the texture of the overall quilting. The quilting pattern was obvious, but it doesn't detract from the houses. I know I already said that, but it's so true. I do NOT regret my decision to do overall quilting on it. That is going to make me rethink many of the quilts I have waiting to be quilted. It will be better to have them quilted than to leave them as UFOs in a pile. 

The texture of the quilt is amazing.

And there it was hanging up at Quilt Canada, and you can see my wildly coloured CN Tower. I didn't want to make it black or grey, as there really wasn't any black or grey in the quilt, aside from the roads. The bottom part was hidden, and many people asked what buildings I put on the bottom - Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower. 

My quilt is in the booth at Quilt Canada

Here is the entire quilt. It looks like there is a ripple near the bottom, but that's because there's one near the top. I hung it up with some clips, and well, even if there is a ripple, it's good enough for me. Notice the orange trees? It's fall in my world - the original had green trees. 

My version of Color My World

And as you can see, the overall pattern does NOT detract from the quilt one little bit! I'm thrilled with the quilt and so happy that it is finished. I must get a label on it as well as several other labels on quilts, and I hope to get that done in July. Hmmmmm—there are a lot of things I hope to get done in July. 

Slow and steady will be my game. 

As a reminder, if you want to see what I am teaching in the fall, you can check out this blog post. I also hope to get the dates worked out in July. And I pray that I do not have another month like June. I have no issues with being busy - it's a stretch for me to be away for so long. I really haven't had time to recover from the wedding before it was time to take off again. That part I don't like. Give me one trip per month, and I'm happy. 

By the way, there will also be a scrap class starting in the fall that will run for 9 months. It's all about how to cut, store, save, and use scraps. More details when I'm back. 

On that note, I'm out of here as I need to get things organized for today. I have many suitcases to load into the car, finish packing the backpack, and hopefully get the girls out for a short walk. 

Have a super day!!!!

Ciao!!!!