Pickle dish progress

I am loving how this quilt is going to look. It is a good thing that I love it because making this quilt has been far more work that I imagined. Last night I was sewing together the 8 dish blocks. I have just two to go and I will have all 25 blocks put together. The block is a 20" square.

The quilt will be king size, 5 blocks by 5 blocks or 100" x 100". I have to decide if I will add a border at the end, to add a few extra inches for more to hang over the sides.



That is the stack of two dish units that I was working on this week - I made these units and then pieced the blocks. These units are 10" square.

Each of these blocks has 20 coloured fabrics and two background pieces and 22 seams. To sew the larger block together that is 2 more seams, so 24 seams times 25 blocks, or 600 seams, before you add the eyes or put the blocks together. No wonder this quilt is taking a long while.



I am going to appliqué the eyes in. The pattern I am roughly following from the book Quilt Romance by K. Fassett instructed one to piece the eyes in as you pieced the 2 dish units together. But I could not manage that nicely without hand sewing them and I figured I would rather appliqué if I was hand sewing.

I did use my no pin method of sewing curves (here is the link to my post with the video) for adding the backgrounds to the dish units. I was able to chain piece them, which was good as there were 200 dish units to add background to.



A close up shows that I am not bad at the appliqué but there is substantial room for improvement. I have 100 to do so hopefully that will be enough to perfect this technique.

I left the paper piecing papers on the dish units. I did pull of the parts of the paper that would have fallen in the seams as I joined the blocks, which made putting the blocks together a bit slower than usual. But since these blocks are full of bias edges and I will be handling them a lot to appliqué, I have kept the papers in to protect it all from too much stretching. It also gives me a nice flat surface to appliqué onto.

Photos, however, will show the appearance of some puffiness in the background but that will all disappear when the papers are finally removed. By the way, I know this from experience, remember when Shine looked like a fried egg?



I quickly re-learned to appliqué by reading up on it in Sarah Fielke's book Hand Quilted with Love and by watching her great video which is on Youtube here. It is worth a look, it is only a couple of minutes and shows a great method for achieving nicely curved edges for the appliqué.

I have a fairly good idea as to how I would like to see this quilt quilted but I don't think I will be able to do that on my home machine because it is just too big. I am debating, should I go and learn how to long arm quilt at the local studio and rent time on a machine to quilt it, or should I chicken out and send it to a pro?

There has been some other sewing going on here, but I will show that later, hopefully tomorrow. You can always follow me on instagram if you cannot wait to see.

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day in Canada and is a day off for many, including me.

Best,

Leanne

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