Nine Kinds of Tea

I finished my nine-design-composition fused applique batik quilt.  Well, the front, anyhow.  It's 45" wide x 42" tall.

I had a hard time deciding how to put the nine blocks together with the still life.  I probably spent several hours trying out everything I could think of, until I settled on this circular arrangement. 

With the edges cut on an angle, it looks like a big coaster.  You might think I planned it that way, but I didn't.   When I was stitching the blocks down, I wasn't noticing how much of the plain border fabric was exposed in the corners.  By the time I got done sewing, I saw that it was heavily weighted to the center.   Trimming the corners made it a little more balanced.

To attach the blocks to the quilt, I simply stitched around the outer edge of each block.  Before I did this, I used a rotary cutter to make the edges slightly wavy.  I thought that would keep the edges from fraying, but I was wrong as you can see in this photograph.  The whole style of the quilt is free-form, so I guess the raw edges aren't out of place.

In an earlier post I mentioned that this yellow/orange fabric was really puffed out, as was the fuchsia "tablecloth" fabric below it.  The only way to make it flat was to make pleats.  I pinched them down, hand basted them, then quilted over them. 

The still life background and the border are very heavily quilted.  The teapot, vase, lamp, and tea cup are very lightly quilted, mostly just around the edges.  I had some intention to trapunto them, but to tell you the truth, I just want to be done with this quilt.  Ergo, no trapunto.

Straight line quilting on the border.

I did mostly light echo quilting on the blocks.

I hope to do the sleeve and label tomorrow, but that's nothing special so I won't be showing the back.  My six UFOs will then be down to two.  Even though I said I wouldn't start any new sewing projects until they're all done, I'm going to sneak in a little something new starting on Wednesday.  It should only take a few days.