Quilt 77: Moda "Poetry" Charm Squares - DONE!

As promised: I'm back on track with quilting again!

And I've just finished another "charm square" quilt.  These are fun to do and are really quick projects.

This charm square pack has lovely floral prints in two shades of pink, blue, yellow, and green.

The prints all have a soft "peach" highlight to them - so I opted to border this quilt with green and a peach-flower print (which I had left over from another project).

I first thought I'd quilt this with white or off-white thread.  But when I auditioned the thread, I realized the white was too bright and seemed to clash.  Instead, I found that thread with a bit of gold in it worked better (the one on the left is Signature Threads' "chamois").

(click the picture above to see a larger image)

And now here's the finished quilt - and as you can see, I've goofed mightily on this one - I failed to notice th(at I clustered the darker pinks all in the center/left of the quilt instead of spreading them evenly).  It looks worse in the photo than it does in real life.  Actually - you hardly notice it at all in real life.

Hmmm... I'm thinking that when I do projects like this one, I should photograph the squares after I arrange them and doublecheck with the camera image before I stitch them together.

50" x 60" - quilted on the longarm - 100% cotton batting

Here's a closeup of the quilt top - showing my loop-d-loop free motion stitching.

And here's the backing - the same soft mossy green used on the borders.  The gold stitching really looks pretty.

And here's something that surprises me quite a lot.  A couple of weeks ago, I reported having trouble with thread fraying and splitting on the "Yellow Roses" quilt I did for my cousin.  I discussed the problem with Howard, my longarm dealer, and he suggested I use a larger needle (going from 16 to 18) - and said that the problem may have arisen because I'm sewing faster than I had been previously. At the time, I didn't think I was, but did note that swapping to an 18 needle pretty much resolved the trouble.

And this quilt proved Howard right!  I've made quilted several projects with roughly the same dimensions as this one, and yup.  I'm quilting faster.  Until now it's taken me about 3-3.5 hours to finish the quilting on a project this size. 

But this one?

I finished it in just under 2 hours!