Dress Form Quilt

You might remember from a previous post that dress forms have been catching my eye lately.  I have some new items in this theme I'll be sharing with you later this month and next month.  But for today, I have a finish to show you.

This was the start of my Dress Form Quilt... 

 

... and this is how it turned out.

I didn't want top and bottom borders, because I wanted a rectangular quilt.

 

The dress form panel fabric included a narrow safety pin border.  To stretch it, I added black fabric on the sides and pieced in a few mini-wonky log cabins.  The sewing machines were large enough that the width of the border only allowed for partial log cabins.   I used solid rectangles on the ends of the borders for some symmetry to offset all that crookedness. 

The borders look like those cat scratching posts with hidey holes for the cats to nest in.  Except there's no room for the cats on account of the sewing machines.

In my small quilting group, one of my friends (Mary) made her wonky log cabin with an elephant in the center.  I thought that was a fine idea.  It inspired me to put a sewing machine in the center of my blocks.  I feel very comforted when my quilts have recognizable objects in them.  I didn't have any elephants, but I did have sheep.

 

When it came time to do the quilting, I groaned.  Quilting is my least favorite part of the process.  I consoled myself by pulling out Angela Walter's Free-Motion Quilting.  This was my first time trying any of her ideas and it turned out to be fun. 

I divided the quilt into three zones: borders, log cabin blocks, and dress form blocks.  I chose two quilting patterns: chain squares and pulleys.

On the borders, I used both.  I did pulleys over the safety pins, because they looked like the bottom end of a safety pin.  I did chain squares on either side.  I used black thread because I wanted the stitching to blend in and there was more black than any other color in the border.

 

 On the log cabins I did chain squares in apricot-colored thread.

On the dress form blocks, I free motioned around the objects and did straight-line stitching along nearly every straight edge.

I'm looking forward to working on my next dress-form-related projects, especially the mini one!  I'll be sure and get that one done this month.