Friday 4 September 2015

Friday finish: king-sized double pinwheel

It's with a huge amount of delight (and some relief!) that I can announce that the king-sized double pinwheel quilt is finished!


After five months of work and more woman-hours (like man-hours but with less moaning) work then I can count, it's finally done and ready to go to its new owners. As you might remember this quilt was the prize in a charity auction for "Let's Talk About William", an awesome charity which provides practical support for parents and families suffering from new-natal deaths and stillbirths.

At 102" by 120", the quilt was far too big to photograph in the usual "quilt with feet" or "quilt draped artfully over a hipster wooden fence". It's also far too big for me to fit into my front loading washing machine so the new owners will have the delight/scare of seeing it go all crinkly! 

This is the best photo I have of it pre quilting and binding.



And here it is quilted and bound (and folded up!).


Hopefully you can still see the pinwheel blocks as well as the secondary design which came out through the diagonal quilting. Suddenly mirror blocks pointing in towards each other appeared. Thank heavens I'd been so anal about making sure my points matched!

The straight line quilting took a lot less Aurifil thread then I was expecting so I've got almost a spool and a half of it left. I also love the little mini pinwheels that appeared when the quilting lines intersected.


And can we just take a moment to appreciate nicely mitred corners on binding?


I do like a nice crisp corner.

So, off she goes to her new owner but not without one final surprise for me. Pinterest recently threw up a pin showing the relative mattress sizes of the UK/EU/USA compared. I'd taken the measurements for a king-sized quilt from a USA website and worked out that 102" x 120" would given decent coverage plus a nice overhang. What I hadn't appreciated was that not all king sized mattresses are the same. A UK king-sized mattress is equivalent to a USA queen sized. So Big Momma as almost 30" bigger on all sides than strictly necessary. Oops. Ah well, you can never have too big a quilt, right?!

5 comments:

  1. It is an extraordinary magnum opus and utterly beautiful too - you can definitely never have too much quilt!

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    1. Thanks Carie! I definitely should have named it "Magnum Opus" rather than "Big Momma", it's so much more sophisticated!

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  2. Love the minus the moaning. You did a wonderful and Fabulous job. I think quilts speak Fall I'd love you to link your beautiful quilt at the Fabulous Fall linky party. I joined Crazy Mom today too. Come party at my house!

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    1. Hi! Many thanks for your post and feel free to link!

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