Saturday 15 June 2013

Ruffle quilt finished

I've been meaning to post this for over a week now... here it is. The final episode in the monster's ruffle quilt saga.

Does anyone remember from earlier posts the fabric I had selected for the monster's ruffle quilt? I had pulled the materials from my stash, bought a few small pieces, salvaged/re-purposed stuff from the old clothes donation pile and even got some at the local op-shop.
You do remember those fabric photos? Well why the heck didn't you tell me at the time that the combination  was hideous? Honestly though I should have been able to see for myself, or at least from the photos above, that it wasn't going to work. I must have had blinkers on because I spent hours and hours cutting and ruffling all that fabric only to lay it all out and decide that it was ugly, really ugly, none of it worked together. I'm kind of glad my old laptop died so I don't feel obliged to post the (now irretrievable) pictorial evidence of this fabric choice/layout disaster.

The monster thought that it needed more purple - bright purple specifically - so off we went to the fabric store in the hope of finding something that would magically tie all those ugly fabrics together into an amazing cohesive quilt. We came home with two possibles - a bright purple fabric with white polka dots and another with coloured spots... still it didn't really work. We even tried using only the bright purples with just the plain pale pink and white fabrics from the original pile.
Fabric choice attempt #3 Purples and pale - not the look I was after
Still no winner it just wasn't coming together like the picture in my head, and definitely nothing like the original inspiration image.

I was getting a bit frustrated and dejected by this point but I'm stubborn and was determined to get a ruffle quilt done for the monster.

I really liked the colour combination in the spotty fabric so I stashed a little scrap of it in my handbag, walked around with it in my bag for over a week, looking at it every time I put anything in or out of the bag and finally took myself off to the fabric store yet again. I found a variety of solids and more dots that I thought might go together with the purple/coloured spots fabric and back to ruffling I went.

Its been a long time coming (2 months overdue by my self imposed schedule) but its finally finished. Hooray!

Its by no means perfect but the monster loves it so much that I haven't even had a chance to retrieve it from her bed to take proper photos of it. I will get around to that at some point, but for now the occasionally blurry, unadjusted phone pics are going to have to do.



It was a long process (made longer by my own poor choices) but I'm pretty proud of how it turned out in the end. I hope you like it too.

K

More on the ruffle quilt:
Quilting Quandries
Ruffles, ruffles and more ruffles

4 comments:

  1. Great job! I love those bright colors!

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    1. Thanks teresajoy. I love the bright colours too. K

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  2. I've had this idea pinned for quite a while :-)
    Yours turned out very nice! A border and everything!
    I would like to know how you backed it and/or quilted it?

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    1. Thanks. I'm still happy with it 5 years later!
      Once I joined all the ruffled blocks I added the border sashing, quilt batting and a recycled (but high quality) sheet for the backing. For the quilting I just sandwiched as a normal quilt, stitched in the ditch of all the ruffled squares so as not to flatten the ruffles at all and quilted straight lines on the border. The binding is made from leftovers of the block fabrics.

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