Greek Quilting

Not a lot of posting so far this week I'm afraid, but I have been squeezing little bits of sewing in here and there when I get a chance. I've been binding this quilt:

Which is now in the wash. If we get a dry day tomorrow hopefully I might get it photographed. But I'm also desperately trying to get this quilt finished:

It's not the most exciting of quilts so I wanted to do some interesting quilting to liven it up a bit. The best place I know to look for ideas on quilting is a blog called The Inbox Jaunt, written by an amazingly talented quilter called Lori. Every Tuesday she writes a tutorial on a different design of quilting, and all these designs are available to look back over on her blog, so there's a wonderful selection to choose from. After a good browse, I found this one:

The square, spiral like pattern was the one that jumped out at me, particularly because it was called 'The Greek Key' and this quilt is heading to the Greek side of our family. Perfect!

Now Lori frequently stresses that it's perfectly possible to quilt a large quilt on an ordinary, domestic machine, and still make it beautiful and detailed. Plenty of her quilts prove this, but, since I have a little less confidence in my quilting abilities, I decided I'd quilt this one in pieces before sewing it all together! And I'm very glad I did. The quilting part is rarely my favourite bit, too often it gets neglected in the rush to finish a quilt, and I think I would have really struggled to get to grips with this on the big, bulky whole quilt and might have just given up and gone for a few boring straight lines instead. As it is, it took me a couple of rows to get going properly, but now I'm managing it. A few of the 'keys' are still a little wonky - predictably!

But you know I'm quite happy with wonkiness! I was hoping to quilt each of my plain stripes in this way, but I'm running out of time (again predictably!) so it may end up with every other stripe. That's still looking good so far though.



I've been drawing a quick guide on for the first 'key' in each row and then I find I can manage the rest reasonably well.

 
The one thing I'm losing by going down more of a 'quilt as you go' route is obviously my lovely 'key' lines won't show on the back of the quilt. You can see them to the left in the photo above, on the old, wool blanket I'm using in the middle, and it is a shame that's not the back, but I think I can live with this downside for the sake of  not having to squeeze the whole quilt through my machine over and over.

I'm off to get a little more done now and I'm linking up, again, with WIP Wednesday (how did we get to Wednesday so fast?!) over on Freshly Pieced. Hopefully might be back tomorrow with my finished quilt, see you then,

Sally.