ALYofF April Goal Accomplished

I finished the last stitch on the binding of my Sample Table Runner at 11 p.m… an hour before I ran out of April!!

And that’s a good thing because it was my A Year of Lovely Finishes April Goal and also on my list of Q2 Goals for Finish-Along 2015.

As I mentioned in my April goal post, the blocks for this table runner came from the very first quilt-a-long hosted by AmandaJean over at crazy mom quilts… way back in 2008.  I had just started to learn to quilt and none of my blocks came out the same size.  So rather than struggle to make them work in a larger quilt, I took the blocks that were closest in size to each other and made them into table runners.  This was the last one that needed to be finished.

When I first started quilting the table runner, I hadn’t planned to do quite as much quilting as I ended up doing.

I started by quilting this block by stitching in the ditch and had planned to do the same with the rest of the blocks and then fmq leaves in the sashing.

But quilting just this one block reminded me that stitch in the ditch has become my least favorite method of any that I’ve tried so far.   Needless to say, even the thought of doing the rest of the blocks that way would have made finishing the table runner less than fun.

So I changed my plan and decided since it was a sampler, I’d do the quilting as a sampler too; quilting each of the blocks differently.

The block on the bottom left in the photo above is done in a simple cross-hatch:

Since the block on the bottom right is a variation of a pinwheel block, I decided to quilt circles to give it some movement.

The block in the middle on the right-hand side was quilted in gently waving lines because the blocks look a little like flags.

For the block in the upper left hand corner, I began by quilting an X and then a Cross.  That looked a little plain, so I shadow quilted inside each of the triangles that the X and Cross made.

I wanted to emphasize the diagonal lines that the line of small squares make across the center of the block in the upper right hand corner, so I quilted diagonal lines on either side of those small blocks and did the same with the larger blocks.

And then finally, here’s a close-up view of the free motion quilted leaves and vines that were done in each of the sashing blocks.

I have to admit that about half way through the quilting on this table runner I was not liking it one bit.  But once I finished all the different quilting and got the binding on, I love how it turned out!

If the sun shines tomorrow, I’ll take some outside shots and add them to this post.

Edited to add:  Well the sun is shining bright and beautiful today so here are some outside shots…

Another close up of the free motion quilted leaves and vines:

And just a couple more shots of it hanging on the fence.

The front:

This view of the back really let’s you see the different quilting that I did on each of the blocks and in the sashing.

I think it’s as pretty as the front.  In fact, it makes me want to try my hand at making a whole cloth quilt!

Thank you  Shanna at Fiber of All Sorts and Melissa at Sew BitterSweet Designs for hosting A Lovely Year of Finishes to help keep me motivated to get another UFOs finished!

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