Blogger's Quilt Festival- Farm Quilt Finale

Finally! The farm quilt is done! Whew, I loved doing it, but it seemed to take forever and life conspired to give me only little bits of time to work on it.

Binding done and time for a bath. Special note: If you use Fons and Porter's white mechanical pencil on dark fabric and then the fabric gets darker when wet, the white will get very bright and act like it will never go away......But it does. Don't freak out. Ahem.

Time to assemble the foam board so the quilt can dry flat. This 6ft.x8ft. piece takes up nearly the entire room!

I have been showing shots of this in progress for a while and have been accused of being a tease with it. It's featured in a few of my free motion quilting videos too. It lays so nice and flat, square. It was a challenge to not over quilt this quilt as it was just so fun to do, but it is destined for a bed and no one wants a stiff quilt on their bed.

 I don't have a big enough area to get a good square, full view shot of the quilt without moving my entire bed out of my room. (Doesn't everybody have a huge design wall behind their headboard?) So I took the best pics I could while up on the staircase overlooking the table.

I am super pleased with how this quilt turned out. My friend wanted "something farm themed but not cutesy". I think I will do another quilt in a similar silhouette style someday, but definitely smaller!

 My little sparrow. I quilted bigger swirls around the branches of the tree to give a nod to foliage, not just bare branches.

Two shots of the back.

Finally, a closer shot of the ruler work. I love how this has turned out! I am so happy to have figured out I could use the ruler toe for use with the Janome 1600P in a frame system could be used on my Janome 6600 for regular sit down free motion quilting on my sewing machine. I am thrilled to be able to share the technique here with so many wonderful quilters! If you're new here, click to find more about using long arm rulers for free motion quilting on a domestic machine.

Some stats:

• 72x72 inches.
• Machine appliqued
• My own design, but inspired by some illustrations in some of my kids' early reader books.
• A commissioned quilt so I don't get to keep it.
• Made and quilted on my Janome 6600.
• Hobb's 80/20 batting

To top it off, it's finished just in the nick of time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival where I'm entering it in  the home machine quilted category. Maybe somebody will like it enough to nominate it for a viewer's choice award? Maybe a few votes? Hmmmm...what is the etiquette for these voting things? I dunno. But I do know that if you'd like to see some fabulous quilts, head over to the festival for links to a ton of great quilts and blogs. You might even want to enter one of your own! Plus there's some great giveaways.