The Fair Isle Quilt

Last Monday, after a marathon of quilting over the weekend, I sewed on the bright red binding to my Fair Isle Quilt thus finishing up this beautiful quilt just in time to take to the local quilters guild which I've just started to attend.  It felt so good to finally have this quilt off my WIP list and on my coach where it can be thoroughly loved and snuggled with. 

I had started this quilt back in November as part of a quilt-a-long put together by Lee over at Freshly Pieced.  Christmas sewing put a pause on this quilt for a while until a couple of weeks ago when I was determined to finish this quilt up while it was still winter and I could enjoy it!
Since I'm challenging myself to stick with my #SewMyStash2015 challenge, I decided to dig into my overstuffed and overflowing bucket of batting scraps and Frankenstein together the scraps to make the batting for this quilt.  I didn't necessarily need to do this since I still have half a roll of batting left, but I figured that since this quilt was going to be for myself and it was going to live on my coach and I wanted it to be double batted, that it would be a good chance to use up some of my batting scraps. 

 And I was right!  I ended up with two layers of Frankenstein batting and a batting scrap bucket that is now only 1/4 full!  Yay for using up scraps even if they are only batting scraps! 

It took most of a day to get the batting sewn together and the quilt top ironed out and ready for basting.  My littlest dude wanted to come check out my progress more than once. 

 Miraculously, I managed to scurry around, move most of my living room furniture around and get this quilt basted during afternoon nap time that same day!  I think it took longer for me to move everything out and then back into my living room than it did to baste this quilt.  Gotta love spray basting! 

It took a couple of days to get this quilt quilted.  I really wanted to do a free motion quilting swirly pattern on it, but since I don't have the FMQ skills yet and my machine doesn't have enough throat space to FMQ a quilt this size, I decided to do some fairly dense "organic" straight line quilting on it.  I originally wanted to do a grid of lines going in both directions, but once I started to put in the vertical lines on top of the horizontal lines, I was just not loving it.  Of coarse, I decided that I didn't love it after I had sewn about a quarter of the vertical lines....Needless to say, I spent several hours picking out the vertical lines.  Lesson learned, know when to stop.

I love how the dense horizontal lines on the double batted quilt really add a beautiful texture to this quilt.  
Finally today, I managed to snag a couple of pictures of this beautiful quilt.  

My husband was able to come home early from work (to make up for having to go in on Sunday), so he so sweetly agreed to stop at a park on the way over to his brother's for dinner this evening and even agreed hold this super heavy quilt up while I snapped a few pictures.  The sun was shining and the snow on the ground really made this gorgeous winter quilt sing!  

 

 Oh and this makes quilt number 49 for me!!!  I've got 5 or so other quilts I'm currently working on in rotation, so I'm not sure who is going to end up being number 50!