Finished quilt: the Autumn Kingfisher quilt

written by -

Quilt details

Name, Recipient, Size, Start/Finished date, Pattern and Fabrics used

  • "Autumn Kingfisher"
  • for myself
  • 142 x 142 cm (length x height).
  • 22.7 - 13.10.2018.
  • The Kingfisher quilt (link 1 and link 2), for the stitch-along event from 16.5 - 23.7 during the summer of 2018 by Rachel Houser (of Stitched in Color) and Jodi Godfrey (of Tales of Cloth).
  • About the fabrics used for the quilt top
    • Background
      • Six different neutrals, all donation or second hand fabrics.
    • Border 1
      • A red solid that came in a scrap bag bought second hand (at Fyndis).
    • Border 2
      • Same as the triangle ends in the center, a donated fabric from Annikki Fogström.
    • Border 3
      • Brown with speckled dots, bought second hand at Combolina flea market.
    • EPP-triangles
    • EPP-hexagon flowers
      • A plethora of scrap fabrics in light brown, oranges, neutrals and pinks. Also a few hexies in yellow, green and one turquoise. All either came from my scrap folders, my stash or as donations from the stash at Arbis.

Batting, backing and binding fabric

  • Single layer of medium thick (100 g) polyester batting from Kruunun Kangas.
  • The quilt back was pieced together from a chocolate brown donation fabric (from Arbis) that had big roses on it, and the rest of the orange fabric from Annikki Fogström.
  • Binding was made out of the rest of the brown fabric with speckled dots.

Label

  • Made out of a leftover low-volume floral diamond block, and a hexie-flower made out of all natural white cotton.

Quilting pattern

  • Walking foot quilting used for the outline quilting and some details on the borders, free motion quilting used to quilt all the hexie-flowers with various motifs.

Top thread

  • For piecing the top: Gutermann Mara 120, color 800 (white).
  • For piecing the back: Gutermann Mara 120, color 1 (natural white).
  • For the walking foot quilting
    • Gutermann Mara 120, color 722 ((light beige) for border 3.
  • For free motion quilting on the hexie-flowers
    • Gutermann Mara 120: color 800 (white), 1 (natural white), 111 (off-white), 722 (light beige), 382 (hot pink), 968 (jeans yellow) and  351 (hot orange)
    • Coats Duet in light turquoise and light violet (labels missing, so I don't know the color nr)
    • Gutermann Sulky (300m, 100% variegated cotton thread) in colors 4003 (light to dark yellow) and 4006 (orange to yellow to red to brown)

Bobbin thread

  • For piecing the top
    • Gutermann Mara 120, color 800 (white) and 1 (natural white).
  • For piecing the back
    • Gutermann Mara 120, color 1 (natural white).
  • For quilting:  
    • Gutermann Mara 120, color 800 (white) for the hexie-flowers, the same in color 722 (light beige) for the border and outline quilting.
  • All in all, it took about 6 full bobbins to free motion quilt the quilt.

Blogged about on

~~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~~

This was the first sew-along / stitch-along I ever participated in. And I'm really glad I did.

I helped me get through a lot that summer and autumn: starting to go to therapy, admitting I had both depression and fatigue syndrome, getting the kids into day care post haste because of it all, starting medication and helping me through the worst of the side effects in the beginning. It also helped keep me slightly happier while the kids - and us parents - got "daycare flu" a lot in the beginning.

 It taught me the value of patience. Of slowing down.

 I learned how wonderful a small hashtag community on Instagram could be, and how good it felt to see how other quilters Kingfisher quilts turned out. It was so much fun, seeing how others interpreted the pattern, making their fabric choices, how they stitched the flowers together, what they thought about it all....and of course, the stories of their quilts. Here's a few off those:
  • Tracy Loukota, USA (link) "Curvy Kingfisher"
    • This one, I think, was everyone's personal favorite. She wrote in her blog post about how her father passed away shortly after she had started making the quilt, and even though she was devastated from it and didn't really want to create anything, working on the more "mindless" sewing on the hexie flowers helped her get through the beginning of it all. 
  • Miss Jen, USA (link) 
    • made this lovely slightly longer one with a limited color palette using turquoise, oranges, and black&white
  • Chris Kostial Giannascoli (link) her "Happy quilt"
    • a rainbow variant
    • seeing someone start out their Instagram account by posting about their Kingfisher, that's not a bad way to start out ;)
  • Helen Steele (link)
    • a rainbow variant
  • Michelle, of Cole & Taffy, Australia (link) 
    • a rainbow variant with a light pink background, and a scrappy border 1
  • Linda Fisher, Australia (link)
    • a low volume rainbow variant
  • Stephanie Hughes, USA (link)
    • got inspired by Tracy Luokota's version, and did a four-diamonds-together block on hers too. Made one with a busy mixed floral background that still looks calm because the hexie flowers have a limited dark grey-dark turquoise-darker pinks palette.
  • Yvonne Campbell, USA (link)
    • had her mother in law, aunt in law, daughter and herself stitch the quilt together. A rainbow scrappy one with a popping turquoise border 1.
  • "Karran quilts", Australia (link)
    • scrappy rainbow variant with a scrappy low volume to darker grey backgrounds, and I'm so envious of her scrappy border 1 and matching scrappy EPP triangles on border 2.
  • Linda Fazendin, USA (link)
    • a darker rainbow variant with a turquoise border 1 
    • posted her stitched hexie+diamond blocks on her Instagram while on a road trip. Made for fun photos. And then, she had to go through surgery for her cancer, and still stitched away on the quilt top. She started hand quilting it during her recovery at home.
You can check the #kingfisherstitchalong hashtag for more :)


 ~~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~~

 But, about my own Autumn Kingfisher.

 I wrote about my fabric choices in the blog post from the 8th of August. To sum it up, I didn't want to buy any new fabric for the quilt, only use up  stash and scrap fabric (like the low volume ones here). And I did, for the most part. Only the fabric I used on the EPP triangles (which was a second hand find in Rauma during Pitsiviikko) and on two hexie-flowers (bought at Jättirätti during Pitsiviikko)

 I won't show you all the photos I've taken of the progress, because then you'll be bored to tears. Instead, you can click on the links above to see the blog posts and Instagram posts I did about it. But I will show you a few more photos of the quilting I did on it, of course.

 These were my background choices. All low volume, "ugly" fabrics that I didn't know what to do with.


Since I already had tried making a few hexie-flowers before, and had started to glue baste small batches of hexies from my scrap fabrics, I started picking out and deciding my color palette for hexie flowers from them.


That meant I started, randomly, with "ugly" pinks and reds.


Because I had already decided and cut out fabrics for all the borders and all the diamonds, as well as already chosen the backing fabric back in July. I folded them all nicely and stored them in this big plastic folder at first. Later, I switched to a slightly larger sturdy see-through plastic bag.


Then, during the rest of the summer, I learned about sewing English paper piecing (EPP). Since the children were still at home then during those hot days, I usually filled up the kiddie pool with warm water and let them play in the shade and eat ice cream, while I sat and prepped hexies and triangles two meters away. The outdoor table was just so messy with it all, and it was so warm that the glue kept melting and not drying on them.


In the end, I actually thread-basted the triangles, just to get the corners to fold nicely.


I cut up an old fabric softener bottle and stuck work-in-progress EPP pieces in it. That small carton traveled with me in my handbag whenever we left the house. I stitched in the car, at the doctor appointments, at the hospital, at the therapist, while watching a movie, pretty much everywhere.


In the beginning, the design wall looked so uninspiring with the hexie-flowers.


So I started learning how to do better fussy cutting with my hexies.


Buying one of those vanishing marker pens helped with that. And, as the kids started going to daycare and I finally got time to slow down and relax around the house, I sat and listened to podcasts while I prepped and stitched hexie-flowers.


I didn't even feel bad about "making holes" in unique fabric fat quarters I had saved.


When the children were getting used to being at daycare, and weren't supposed to be there for a whole day yet, I waited in the nearby park and stitched away in the sunshine.


I like to think I got better at fussy cutting towards the end. And I perfected my own technique for prepping them, after having bought Diana Gilleland's book "All Points Patchwork: English Paper Piecing beyond the Hexagon for Quilts & Small Projects" (and while I found the link to the Kindle book I saw it only costs 3 dollars - that's a really good deal! I bought it for the original 19 dollars, and it's a good book - I can't recommend it enough :) ) I learned about the masking tape thing from her, but I learned how one should be sewing EPP historically correct by reading Barbara Brackman's blog about it.

It works for me.

And I can get to sew with double high quality polyester thread with a small, thin hand-quilting needle and no stitch I do is visible on the front of the flower.

First, cut...


...then baste and place...


....secure with masking tape...


...and check that they're placed near enough from the back, and move them if such is the case. Then it's just sewing it together.


I even posted a short video of it to Instagram:


And also how I sew them together:


Then, as the school year started in September, and the quilting courses started again, I finished the quilt top there during two lessons.

Deciding the placement of the diamonds in a scrappy way was impossible in my mind, so I just lay them in a matching pattern.


Sewing the rows together took some time, but I managed to make the corners meet most of the time. But I didn't stress out when they didn't, a long as the row itself fit together with the adjacent ones.


Then, it was placing the flowers and sewing on the borders. I was still lacking three flowers back then.


It was weird how putting the borders on and getting the flowers placed made the quilt top suddenly get more cohesive. It felt then like a true transformation.


I pinned the flowers to the top (using quilting safety needles), and hand-stitched them on. It took me a while, usually one to two flowers per day/evening.


This was when I had gotten two rows done.


I also joined in the #saturdaynightcraftalong to get cheered up while I was doing the sewing, because by then I just wanted that part to be over so I could start basting and quilting it.


Oh, and don't forget that I had to make the remaining hexie flowers that were missing...


And then, the top was suddenly done.


And, since I already decided what to back it with in the beginning, I just had to sew a border on the backing to get it large enough. I used the same orange I had used on the front for the setting triangles and border 2.


And it was JUST large enough.

But it was enough.

So, I basted it and took it with me to the quilting course to stay stitch the edges and start doing the outline quilting.



I also spent a bit of time planning what thread color I could use on what section. The front row and those on the left hand were the ones that "made the cut".


After the outline quilting was done, I stitched on the binding.


And then I started doing the free motion quilting on the flowers.


Here's a photo taken before I started sewing all the thread ends. The sunlight made the quilting look so pretty. And I must say, I so love the "portrait" function on the camera in my phone.


Here's a photo I look before I added yet another line of quilting around the EPP triangles.


After I had sewn in all the thread ends, we had a really nice autumn day when the sun peeked out through the clouds and we had just a little wind, I took a few photos outside of it. I hanged it in out cherry tree, and my daughter ran around in the garden while I took a few photos. Then, when I posted them to Instagram, I forgot to turn off the sound for the video, so you can hear her asking me to go inside and "gå sova!" ("go to bed/sleep", because she was tired and wanted to take a nap).


The last thing I did was the quilt label. I got my inspiration for making it from the last "pretty" diamond block that didn't fit into the design I planned out while sewing together the top. It was the very last of that fabric, so I stitched together one last hexie-flower in all natural white, and wrote my label on it.

I then hand-stitched and hand-quilted it (but only through the back and batting, not through the quilt top) to the quilt. And I thought it turned out great, even if the text under "Jodi Godfrey" barely fit: "of Tales of Cloth" was a bit too long. But, it did fit, and I got all the rest of the info to fit on the label too.

It's actually only the second ever "true" label I've made on a quilt. The first one was the one I made for the "Cars"-quilt, and that one was also made from a leftover block.


Now, here are the designs I drew of the quilting patterns I made on the hexie flowers. All of them were free motion quilted with my Pfaff sewing machine, after I had gotten all the outline quilting done with walking foot quilting. I changed colors quite freely between flowers, and it took a lot of stop and starts to go from flower to flower while changing to another color in between.

I think I managed to quilt up to five flowers in similar color (e.g. all the ones I wanted orange thread in I did in one session, then all the ones with white, etc) but for some colors, like the turquoise and light green, I only quilted that single little area and then immediately changed to the color the rest of the flower was supposed to have.

Enjoy the quilting diagrams :) All of them can be quilted continuously.













Hope you got something out of them, most of them are really basic and I tried to show (via the small dots on the lines) where I started and stopped.

To those of you reading who also made a Kingfisher quilt - thank you so much for reading this.

 And a big thank you, thank you, THANK YOU again to Rachel Houser and Jodi Godfrey for organizing this lovely stitch-along.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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