Piggy Pile: Millie Met Her Deadline

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Millie Met Her Deadline

I finished my Modern Millie, aka Wild Millie, quilt one day before my deadline of June 2.

This was pretty much the state of it as of last Wednesday. To finish a 4' x 5' quilt in less than a week took a lot of time, so I impressed myself by meeting my deadline.

I wanted to experiment with this pattern (Modern Millie from Thornberry Quilts) by doing different colored blocks. I made some of the blocks in March, but before making the rest last week, I arranged the background squares the way I wanted them. Then I went ahead with the insert strips. That way I could control the composition better.

If I had used just one background fabric like the pattern did, then I would have made all the blocks before arranging them. But with my design, I had two variables to deal with: background fabric and number of insert strips. A totally random approach wouldn't have worked out as well.

This is the finished front.

I needed a quick way to quilt this and I didn't have any good ideas. I called the class teacher who made three of these quilts, each quilted a different way.

I picked her simplest way: First, stitch around the edge of each block, just inside the seam line. I used the edge of my walking foot which was around 1/3".

Then do parallel lines of stitching within one block at a time, skipping over the insert strips. Instead of having all the lines start at the top, she said to stitch down, then over, then flip the quilt 180 degrees, then stitch back in the other direction, etc. This prevents one giant pucker from happening at the bottom of each block. It worked great, but it did take extra effort with all the twisting and pushing of the quilt through the machine arm.

You can sort of see in this picture that the direction of the stitching varies by 90 degrees from one block to the next: one is horizontal, the next is vertical, etc.

Of the 20 blocks, there were 10 distinct background fabrics. I used a different colored thread for each one, so it would blend in as much as possible.

Some of the thread colors were obvious when matching to the fabric, but for others I had to make little labels. Notice how the label in the upper right is for a lavender fabric but the thread is silver. And the one in the lower left is for dark grey fabric but the thread is purple. Surprising, but true.

Each 12" block took 30 - 45 minutes to quilt, depending on its location and how much fabric I had to squish around. Like I said, I had two blocks of each background fabric. To get around the tedium of so much quilting in a short time, I did one set of two blocks at a time, then switched to the next thread color and did another set of two.

Like pushing wooden beads on an abacus, I pushed each thread apart from the group as I finished with it. This small measure of visual progress was rather appealing.

Plus, it was sort of like bingo as I waited to see when I would complete one entire row or column.

I like the back better than the front. I didn't plan on this design ahead of time, I just pulled out lots and lots of fabric to audition until I settled on just these three prints.

I started with the dahlia center block - it's the size it is because that's the size of the fabric I had once I trimmed off a little scrap that was sticking out from my rectangle. Then I added that pink/purple paisley to each side.

I didn't have enough of the paisley to completely fill out the top and bottom row, so I used the dahlia scrap. I was going to put a dahlia in two corners, and the grey/chartreuse in the other two corners. But I think the design I came up with is more interesting.

For my label, I made a teeny slice-and-insert block. Sometimes my labels get ridiculously large, but I was in a time crunch so it's very small. Besides, since I like the back so much, I wanted the label to be discrete.