My First Ever *Proper* Quilt

I discovered today that I have not ever shared properly the first proper quilt I have made, using the three layers of top, batting and backing. A couple of pics have been shared here and there, but this quilt deserves its very own blogpost! So it is only proper that I should amend this.

The pattern called ‘Twilight’ is by Leslie Beck at Fiber Mosaic and features in BHG’s Quilt Lovers’ Favorites Vol 4. The checkered border was added by me to increase the size.

In 2008, I re-discovered quilting when visting the US – at Barnes and Noble. I bought two books, one of which was a Better Homes and Gardens compilation of Quilt Lovers’ Favorites. This quilt ‘Twilight’ was featured there. I chose this pattern because it was in my son’s favourite colour, blue, and indigo prints were easily available in my city. These are mainly muslins and cambrics, a couple of handwoven fabrics. All are hand-block or mud resist-dye printed, by a method called Dabu printing.

These fabrics are all manually printed by local printers, using natural indigo by a mud-resist dyeing method called ‘Dabu printing’.

I knew nothing about chain piecing or strip-piecing and had no idea whatsoever about short cut methods for piecing. Nine pieces to each block was a huge number for me and it took me almost two months to piece this. The blocks finished at 4.5″ and there were 124 of them to make! The checkered border was added to add width and length to the top for my six -foot plus tall son! The squares in the border are 1.5″ finished. The quilt top finishes at 67″ x 95″, if I remember correctly!

Do you know I have a tutorial for making a perfect basic four-patch square quilt block, similar to those used here? I wish I had known this earlier!

27112008179 — This is the quilt top, finally ready to be quilted.

I had no idea about batting either. The polyfibre batting used here is almost an inch thick. I knew nothing about hand quilting either. What I read and saw on the net was that the stitches were supposed to be 10 to an inch! Each stitch involved, therefore, pushing the needle down three layers, and pulling the entire thread down to the other side. Then the reverse, each time adjusting the shifting, slippery layers to ensure the stitch was just 1/10″ and in place! So it took me four months to hand quilt it. I quilted different sashiko patterns on all the blue squares, except the outermost 2 rows.