Coffee Anyone? is finished!!!

A month has flown by since I dove in learning to use Marti Michell's templates to make her Lazy Afternoon. I kept at it and with this past Saturday's monthly Marti & Me class fast approaching, I spent Friday at the HQ16 quilting my Coffee Anyone? quilt. I wanted to have it as done as I could to take to share with the class. Miracle of miracles, the quilting was done, quilt trimmed, and the big tables put up in the living room and taken back down and stowed in the garage before midnight! In fact, before 10pm!!! After class I went home and sewed the binding on and last night and today worked on hand stitching the binding down. It's nice to have it done and I'm happy with how it turned out.

As a followup to my post about using the soluble stabilizer to trace-and-stitch my quilting design, after sleeping (and dreaming) on it, on Friday morning I decided I wanted the quilting done with more precision, so I ripped it all out and started over. Thank goodness I had only quilted one block!  Instead, I used the same design as before, but used my ruler and chalk roller to draw all the lines very straight and then used my Stitch-in-the-Ditch ruler as a guide to keep the lines straight as I sewed. I was able to adapt the design to fit the four outer star blocks specifically as well. It was fun to get it all figured out and stitch each block completely with only one jump from the small inner square to the outer square in the center of the main design. The entire quilt was pieced and quilted with Aurifil 50 in either ivory, light blue or dark brown, with the exception of the ditch work done with clear YLI Wonder Invisible Thread on top.

Here's a closeup of the geometric quilting design in one of the star blocks. I modified the center star design slightly for the four outside stars so that the quilting goes up into the points. For the four corner Jacob's Ladders, I ditched the triangles, stitched a single line diagonally from the top corner through the three central squares and on through the adjacent small tan square as well. Then I waffled the tan triangles to give the block some texture. The cups border print on the top and bottom have stipple around them and a single outline of each cup to help them pop.

I even pieced the back with leftover striped prints from the half-yard cuts in the original bundle of coffee fabrics. I'm loving the color play and how cute it turned out!

 

This was a fun little quilt to make. Today while I was sewing the binding down, Jacob kept coming over and burying his head in the quilt and giggling, and then started pulling on it! I still had a needle in it, so I couldn't let him take it. When I threw another quilt over him, he just tossed it aside and came back to the Coffee Anyone? I guess he likes it! He's not a coffee drinker yet (he's only 13 months old), but his folks sure are! With both hands busy keeping the needle out of his reach I didn't get a pic, but will try to snap him with it next week when we start our fall semester daycare routine up again.

More Coffee is on the design board and will be talked about later in the week probably. It's the second quilt from this box of fabrics and there's plenty left for yet another one or two! I think scraps multiply when we're not watching! Or I may take a break from this theme to work on the next Marti & Me, the Seven Sisters quilt. I've pulled a bunch of Christmas fabrics to play with on that one. Should be fun!

More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz