Butterfly Kisses

I finally finished Granddaughter's quilt.  The last quilt I finished was for her mom - roughly 29 years ago!  Don't look too closely or you will see lots of imperfections.  Having said that, I am so pleased with how it turned out!

I used the "Essentially Irish" pattern from this Fabric Surprises booklet by Love of Quilting magazine.  I notice that Northcott is one of the sponsors of this booklet and I used Northcott fabrics for this quilt, so it seems it was meant to be. I love these fabrics and I'm pretty sure Granddaughter will as well, especially as she gets into her teenage years.  Hopefully it holds together for her until then.

I thought about embroidering butterflies on it after I had pieced the quilt top.  You would think it would have been easier to do that ahead of time but I think having the top as a sheet helped with the hooping for the embroidery machine.  I quilted diagonal lines over the Irish chain squares, and then decided not to continue through the butterfly squares as I didn't want them to hide.  Then I had to decide how to add some quilting for stability within those squares.  I finally settled on free motion echo quilting.  This was also a first for me and my seam ripper got a really good workout.  I finally decided to ditch the King Tut varigated thread I used for my diagonal lines and instead go for a colour match to the butterfly background to better hide the very beginner free motion quilting.  I think in the end this was a good choice.

 I continued the diagonal lines through the border all the way around, but left the bits between the butterfly squares as long rectangles.  I used 2 1/4" strips for the binding as that's what I had on hand already cut.  It worked just fine and I don't really think you need 2 1/2" as is usually recommended.  I spent about 5 1/2 hours sewing the binding down by hand.  I may try stitch in the ditch on a future quilt but I really wanted this to be the best that it could be.  I finished it off with a label. 

I did run into some problems with this quilt.  The heat-activated glue-basting batting wouldn't stay stuck.  I have two quilts using this batting and had the same problem with both.  Apparently the quilt store had a bad roll.  I ended up having to pin baste it all anyway.  Then I was in a bit of a panic when Phoebe the Pfaff was getting all wonky with the tension as I started quilting.  I was working on the class quilt (that still isn't finished) from the class that I took to learn how to finish this quilt.  I sent her to the dealer for service and started working on Bob the Brother instead.  This meant buying a walking foot.  And a 1/4" edge guide.  But Bob was also giving me tension issues - I thought I was going to lose my mind!  Then I realized that Bob wasn't cutting my bobbin thread, and I was using the same bobbin as I did on Phoebe (there are supposed to be interchangeable), so perhaps there is a problem with the bobbin.  I rewound it to a Brother bobbin and then Bob started giving me a beautiful stitch.  So half of the quilt lines on the class quilt are a bit wonky where I was test driving quilting but it was all sorted out before I started quilting on this one.  And now I have two machines that I can use for quilting.  Bonus!  I should mention "Butterfly Kisses" has the Holley stamp of approval.

Update:  When I made Brooke's quilt I decided to update Sydney's quilt label to something a little better.