Peaches & Cream

This is my latest finished project, and I'm calling it Peaches and Cream.   I've been working on it (off and on) for quite a while.  In fact, I finished making the quilt top back in January.  When I made the top, I pressed some of the seams open to reduce bulk where multiple seams came together.  Most often, when I quilt something myself, I quilt in the ditch.  You can't really do that when you've pressed seams open or else you are just quilting over the stitches and not into actual fabric.  So I had to figure out how I wanted to quilt it.

I thought about outline quilting, but that would have made a lot of threads to bury and I would have had to decide what, exactly, need to be outlined.  I also considered quilting diagonal lines, in both directions, across the quilt, but that would have meant so much marking.  I hate marking, so I opted against that, too.

Then, back in February, I was reading an article in an issue of Quiltmaker magazine about quilting with decorative stitches.  I thought that would be a good solution for my dilemma with this quilt, because the decorative stitch could follow the seam lines, like with stitching in the ditch, but it would spread out and not just be in the ditch, so it would work.  Great!  But then my sewing machine didn't want to sew the decorative stitches.

I tried a new needle and I tried different thread, but my machine kept dropping stitches when I tried to do the decorative stitches on my machine.  Finally I decided that I was going to have to take the machine in and have it looked at.  I wasn't happy with the place I had taken it to before, so I had to find a new place.  I quilting friend suggested a place and I took it there.  He was really good and pretty quick, too.  So finally, the problems were solved.  Then the work had to begin again.

I used a decorative stitch and quilted a line from the middle of the center 4-patch in the second row to the middle of the center 4-patch in the third row.  Then I quilted rectangles around that center line that followed the seam lines of the quilt.  I used the decorative stitch for whole quilt center and then used a straight stitch for the seam where the border is added on (it wasn't pressed open) and in the center of the border.

Now after attaching the binding, turning it by hand, and attaching a label, the quilt is finally done.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.  It was originally intended for a baby that was due back in March, so I ended up giving her a different quilt instead.  Oh well, it never hurts to have extra baby quilts on hand, right?

Update January 2020:  This quilt is being given as a gift to Kinsley Porter at her baptism on Feb. 2, 2020 by the Blanket Guild at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Troy, AL.