4th of July Picnic Quilt Finished

Last Sunday, I posted that I was closing in on finishing the 4^th of July picnic quilt that I started last summer.   A large part of Sunday afternoon was spent sitting out in the screened in porch enjoying the beautiful weather and hand stitching the binding to the back of the quilt.   Once I lost the light, I moved inside to continue stitching while watching a couple of Agatha Christie Mystery DVDs.

Monday I embroidered a label for it and then as you know I got distracted making a couple of adorable little turtles.

The quilt was put through the wash twice on Wednesday.  And may I just say, thank goodness for Color Catchers; otherwise instead of a red, white and blue quilt, I may have ended up with a red, pink and blue quilt.

Those six on the left are from the first wash that we went to the Laundromat to do as I thought a larger front loading washer might be better for its first wash.  But we must have gotten a washer where the previous user had overfilled the detergent section because even after two rinse cycles the water was still sudsy.

I decided to bring the quilt back to the apartment and put it through a full wash cycle but with no soap… essentially giving it two more rinse cycles.  When I did that I also changed out the Color Catchers (the middle four.)

Since that second batch of Color Catchers still came out quite pink, I decided a second wash with detergent and four more Color Catchers were called for.

As you can see, the last four on the right are still a bit pink.   But I decided two washes would do for now and into the dryer it went.

Yesterday morning I sewed on the label and Dave and I headed off to the beach for a photo shoot.

Quilt Stats:

Started July 2012, Finished March 2013

Size: 57.5″ X 68.5″

The pattern was a free pattern called the Potato Chip Quilt (because you can’t make just one) from Mammaw’s Thimble in Knoxville, TN.

The quilting is just simple straight line quilting to frame the blocks.

On other blogs, I often see finished quilts draped artfully over things, so we took a couple of those photos too.

With the 4th of July picnic quilt finished and the hexie flowers used to make Lexie the Hexie Turtle and her BFF, I only have one more sewing project that was started in 2012 to complete… these embellished bird panels.  I’m hoping to work on turning those into something this weekend with breaks for making more hexies to make more hexie flowers to make more turtles!

Wishing everyone a heart-centered weekend with much Aloha!!

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