The One Where Modern Meets Traditional

My mother so very kindly reminded me that I haven't blogged in almost a month. That was a few weeks ago. So what better way to get my behind in gear with blogging than to post a finish?! Remember that ombre double wedding ring quilt I mentioned before? It was just in the last post, but apparently that's been a month and a half ago :P I finally got it done, hand quilting and all!

I had mentioned that I wasn't sure if I was going to keep going with the hand quilting or go ahead and machine quilt it. I've never hand quilted a quilt before and wasn't sure of my skills or if my inner perfectionist would be happy with it's imperfections. But once I got done I realized I was in love with it. 

Especially after I sprayed the quilt to remove the marking pen and it did this crinkly thing and gave it this fun antique look. 

I couldn't decide if I wanted to iron the quilt and smooth it back out again or not. I was torn between my love for the crinkly look, and whether I wanted the modern feel of the quilt to have that crinkly look. In the end, my love for it won over and I left it alone.  

I quilted it with straight(ish) lines using a white thread, and then circles in different colored threads. I only used colors that were the same colors as the ombre rings on the front. Bree, being the wonderful sounding board that she is, suggested this plan of attack for the colors and I love it. The straight lines give it the texture without jumping out and taking away from the quilt while the circles give you something to look at. 

When I decided on the binding, I really didn't want to take away from that ombre effect, so I used leftover strips from the fabric and used the matched binding method that I learned from Debbie over at A Quilter's Table. 

When I ordered the background fabric, I underestimated just how much I would need, and didn't realize that there would be parts of it that I didn't want to include in the quilt, so I was short what I needed for the entire background. I could have cut from those pieces that I didn't want to include, but instead decided to put in some random gray pieces from my stash to fill in the gaps. So it was part necessity and part design decision to have those couple of random background pieces thrown in. 

This was, easily, the most challenging quilt I have ever done. It was also a lot of fun and boy did I learn a lot. 

I'm going to enter it into the Double Wedding Ring Challenge, wish me luck!

P.S. You know that hip pouch tutorial that I've been promising for oh, about three months now? It's DONE. Bree is proof reading it for me and has made a tester too. I'll get it posted in the next few days!