Mod Pop - Ta Da!

I am all done this huge Mod Pop! I had my tall teenagers stand on chairs and reach up to hold her today, as it was sort of clear and not at all cold. This king size quilt is 98" x 91", which is 8.2 feet tall by 7.6 feet wide. She is made from cottons in pink, orange and red, most but not all of them are Konas. The turquoise and royal blue chains are Essex linen. Julie from Distant Pickles designed this excellent pattern and it is available here.



I quilted this quilt my self on my Janome Horizon - which has an extra wide harp for quilting. I free motioned a squareish stipple on the background red bits and I used my walking foot to echo the chains. I used a whole bunch of red/orange/pink and blue/turquoise variegated and plain threads - Aurafil, Superior Threads King Tut and Sulky.

 

You can see the quilting on the back a bit better - for the back I used a king size grey sheet. That photo was taken before I washed her.



I call this quilting "modern industrial" because it is not even close to perfect. The heavy quilt - there are a lot of seams - pulled the needle every time I stopped and although I tried hard to hold everything in place, the quilt shifted and pulled on the needle, often making little jogs, especially in the lines echoing the chains. But as I expected, you really don't notice that at all once the quilt is washed and dried.



There she is on my king size bed. I made the binding out of left over bits of the reds, pinks and oranges. In the spirit of modern industrial, and because I could not bring my self to hand stitch about 41 feet, I machine stitched the binding down. I followed the excellent tutorials from my friend Marianne from The Quilting Edge here and here. I did have to redo a couple of the corners, but I am getting better at them.



These last two photos are from before I washed this quilt. If you look you can see that there is a fair bit of drawing in from the wash and dry. I pre-washed all the fabrics, so that draw in is coming from the shrinkage in the cotton batting and the thread.



The colours for this quilt were inspired to a large degree by the Andy Warhol portraits that use the turquoise and navy with aquas and blues. His images and colours are sort etched in my brain and they just felt like the right fit for this pattern. These colours are really hard to photograph, all I can say it that she is pretty bright in real life, sometimes I wonder if sunglasses are required.

So, all I have to do is think up a name for her. My small Mod Pop was named Whitewater and you all helped me to find that name. Do you have some name ideas for me for this one?

I started the Mod Pop QAL because I wanted to make a large size version of quilt and needed some friends to work along with me. I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has been quilting along with me. I don't know if I would have hung in there to finish this huge project without all the support from the group.

There is another prize for everyone who finishes their Mod Pop quilts by February 17. However if you are going to be trailing along after, not to worry, I will keep the flickr group open and am happy to help anyone who needs it.

Oh and this is my first finish for the the FAL, so I get to show off my other button again too.

I hope you are all doing well on your finishes, I keep coming across them all over blogland. I have an update on sponsors coming soon for the FAL so stay tuned.

I keep posting on the wrong days for the link ups I know but today is Fabric Tuesday at Quilt Story so I will link there and visit the others for inspiration. I hope you do too.
Best,

Leanne